


Pocket Nova

by can_we_swap_owls



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Allegations of frottage, Cat burglary, Gratuitous fishing metaphors, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Incel Hux is canon and you cannot change my mind, Let! Him! Tinker!, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mistaken Identity, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The First Order has an HR Department and Hux loves it, Virgin Hux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-04-06 13:14:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14057733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/can_we_swap_owls/pseuds/can_we_swap_owls
Summary: Hux has a destiny to collide with and a galaxy to subjugate. Sex is a distraction for men who have the luxury of lesser aspirations.And men on shore leave.(Or: Hux takes shore leave. Naturally, Kylo Ren ruins it.)





	1. No-holiday no-way

They eventually find him under a technician's speeder in the upper hangar, body half-hidden under the plastisteel chassis and covered up to his elbows in motor oil, pretending a minor repair needs his direct oversight. He can only assume that the technician who needs the speeder to do his rounds dobbed him in, for which he will be spaced.  

“Sir.” It's Peavey. Of course it’s kriffing Peavey. 

“Yes,” Hux says into the mess of brake-lines he’s been toying with. Then with more authority: “Yes?”

He slides himself out from under the craft. Peavey is making a commendable show of being at parade rest and staring blankly into the middle distance in order to compensate for being a massive, brown-nosing twat. Hux has no doubt that Peavey was among the first to volunteer when the comm went out to locate the general for his scheduled handover. Peavey has a regulation blaster at his hip but Hux would not put it past to him to have considered bringing some sort of net deploying weapon.

He supposes Peavey ought to get some credit for finding him. He is merely enforcing Hux’s protocols after all, and it was not by his design that Hux is in such a ridiculous predicament.  

As it turns out, Hux has accrued - as an unfortunate side effect of his own rigorously fair ship constitution (and his personal aversion to the concept of "weekends") - over seven months of leave. 

Naturally, on learning of this he attempted to threaten and beguile several members of the human resources team into declaring his benefits package a grievous statistical error; but even his numerous unsubtle allusions to execution by airlock were met with monotone, faux-apologetic explanations of the First Order's intractable bureaucracy. Hux had been borderline impressed. This was exactly the kind of exemplary rule-abiding behavior that he longed to impose throughout the galaxy. Nevertheless, it did not detract from the awful and pending reality that he could no longer avoid taking a holiday.

That reality was then further compounded when the news reached Snoke.

Hux had expected the Supreme Leader to share the same no-holiday-no-way values as him. After all, Snoke had personally praised Hux for his ability to avoid sleep – once for a 96-hour block; a series of events which eventually culminated in a team of medical droids hunting him down in his private quarters where he was making urgent custom alternations to his sonic head, and giving him an ultimatum: relegate himself to a five-cycle no-caf recovery period or take a tranquilizer dart in the ass. 

But instead of support aboard the _Supremacy_  he had been met with consternation.

“How can we expect innovation, General, without _inspiration_?” Snoke said, leaning forward on his throne.

Hux blinked. Supreme Leader seemed to have mistaken him for one of his star-brained neophytes to whom this sort of philosophical claptrap made sense. Case in point, at his side Ren was nodding. That or he was caught in a cycle of rapidly falling asleep and waking, which Hux would not put past him.

“Supreme Leader,” Hux said, glad that his voice in the amphitheater was clear and passionate and not even faintly petulant. “I can innovate without…undue inspiration. My projects—”

“Yes, General. Your projects. Your grand...technologies.” Hux frowned. Snoke tended to use the phrase grand technologies when he was insinuating that his inability to communicate via datapad, which he was invariably holding upside down, was somehow Hux's fault. “This vast weapon you are building which you say will assure us victory” - Hux supposed he was fortunate Snoke was not still calling it his “laser planet" - “But what will you make for us after the Resistance is crushed and the galaxy is given over to order, General? What weapons will you build to bring prosperity? To quell the masses? To—”

Snoke sneezed. Hux cleared his throat awkwardly in the silence, hoping Snoke wasn’t waiting for him to acknowledge it.

“You will take your leave,” Snoke said finally, although he looked like he wanted to sneeze again. “Return with fresh perspective.”

Hux grit his teeth against the rage that swelled up in his throat. “As you say, Supreme Leader.” 

“General,” Snoke said, as Hux was turning to leave. “Do you...” he leaned forward again. “Are you keeping a _cat_ on vessel?”

“No, Supreme Leader,” Hux lied. 

And so, finally, Hux had negotiated his leave down to two cycles - the maximum amount of time he was willing to give command of the _Finalizer_ over to Captain Peavey. A man Hux had once heard stormtroopers refer to as “the Party Captain”. 

Hux gets to his feet and glares at the man in question as he tugs his sleeves violently down over his grease-stained forearms - annoyed that he has discarded his gloves somewhere during his tinkering. In the harsh light of the hangar Peavey looks just about as ancient and as used up as all the other men Hux has fired and supplanted. But Hux recognizes the opportunistic gleam in his deep-set eyes. The moment he steps off his ship Peavey is going to do something dastardly, like fire on his transport, or relax the dress uniform protocols. 

“I assume I'm needed on the bridge then, Captain,” he says, priding himself on the creativity with which he has phrased his involuntary handover. 

“Yes, General,” Peavey says, double checking his datapad. “Time is currently 0800. Your shuttle is scheduled to depart at 0900 hours, as per your request.”

Hux, from his vantage point under the speeder, has been watching the hangar crew clear and fuel the small utility transport all morning. It is not a vehicle with which Hux is familiar but he has come to detest its design on principle. Small and unimposing - its only redeeming feature is that it has no defensive weaponry and so will hopefully be shot out of the sky. He will be sharing the ride with a mismatched squad of non-essentials and stormtroopers rostered for the same leave drop. 

“Excellent,” he says, breezing past Peavey and pretending he can't see the mechanic sliding in to take his place under the speeder in order to undo his modifications. “I'll make the necessary preparations before I'm relieved of duty. You can join me.” The words taste like ash. Hux promises himself he will never say them again.  

He stifles a sigh as he enters the central lift with Peavey unabashedly dogging him. He has spent all his time in a state of dread and hypothetical escape contingencies and now the run-up to departure is simply a series of mundane tasks in unavoidable order. 

Peavey waits outside his chambers as he packs, at least. It takes him some time to find his purpose-bought civilian clothes, still in flimsy plastic wrapping from the merchant. He hasn't worn anything other than a uniform since his induction. Even his pajamas are just regulation sweats he kept from his days at the Academy, admittedly too short at the ankles now. Hux has one off cycle per week and he usually spends it in the officer's gym performing his fitness routine and pitching to the staff there why he should be allowed to join the advanced sparring sessions with Captain Phasma. Occasionally, if he is particularly worn out and deserving, he spends the day in bed, sampling from his wine subscription and indulging in classic literature. On those days he wears a black silk robe, which he only has on hand because he had to celebrate assassinating his father somehow. 

He stuffs the clothes and a change of underwear into a nondescript duffel bag, along with a book, his toothbrush, depi-tool, shampoo and pomade. He is not permitted to take a firearm and the civvies will not sufficiently conceal his monomolecular retractable, so he settles for a blade tucked in his left jackboot. 

On a last sweep of the room his eyes catch on a spark of incongruous yellow. Someone - a droid presumably, seeing as Hux would promptly interrogate and demote anyone stupid enough to enter his chambers without him present - has left a small kit on his desk. Upon inspection it appears to be mostly medication. There is a blister pack of anti-nausea pills and several single-use gas cylinders for gravity acclimatization. Hux, like any other man who has spent the majority of his life in space, is quite sensitive to the oppressing weight of life on-planet.

Inside the kit there is also a small supply of gel tabs for sterility and - Hux swallows - prophylactic purposes. He might as well throw those away. _Yes_ , he decides, pinching the streamer of tabs and holding it over the wastebasket. 

It had occurred to him that when Snoke said Hux would benefit from inspiration he meant… _carnal knowledge_. He hadn't asked for clarification because he was afraid Snoke would actually say carnal knowledge, and there's only so much propriety Hux can sustain when hearing something like that from a man in a gold bathrobe. 

 _Carnal knowledge._ Hux sneers at the thought, rubbing the foil between his fingers. As if such a base act could ever have value.  

Hux's lack of encounters in that province is something which he has been able to suppress with such success that he almost forgets the fact of it entirely. His avoidance of the act itself has been easy. As Brendol Hux's son among the vicious, half-starved outer rim brats of the Academy he was singular, solitary, untouchable. Later, when the natural course of puberty drove some of his dorm-mates to take leave of their senses and approach him, he made them regret it. They learned that Armitage Hux was frigid, scornful, and calculating. He turned off some; exposed others. For the persistent, aggressive ones, or the ones who had some nebulous thing that Hux coveted, there were other solutions. An older boy struck off and sent away; an accident in the firing stocks; a fast-tracked young cadet feminized by a stray shot from the otherwise prodigious sniper. 

After graduation he was singularly dedicated to climbing the ladder of authority, and petty distractions - small talk, friendships, vanity – were dust in the wake of his gargantuan ambitions.

Thanks to his dedication and lack of exploitable vices he climbed the ranks at such unprecedented speed that by the time he stopped to take stock of his achievements he had become peerless; the youngest general on record at 31. Among his equals the next youngest officer of rank was Colonel Datoo, 12 years his senior. 

And now, as commanding officer aboard the _Finalizer_ , Hux requires all stormtroopers and personnel - including himself - to report for vaccinations: a regimen of hygiene shots that deodorize the body and lower sexual drive. From a human capital standpoint he simply cannot allow fraternization to flourish aboard his ship. He learned from the Academy the inherent liability of forming attachments, romantic or otherwise, and of exposing one's vulnerabilities to another. And from his father he learned the repercussions of siring bastards. Hux will never risk such a thing. He has a destiny to collide with and a galaxy to subjugate. Sex is a distraction for men who have the luxury of lesser aspirations. 

And men on shore leave.

In an odd dissociative state Hux finds himself popping two of the tabs into his palm and swallowing them. They can't do any harm, he reasons. And if he does by some remote chance secure some sort of tactical…carnal knowledge...target then it will be to his advantage. 

With the kit in his duffel he can no longer procrastinate. He kneels next to his bed and drums his fingers on the floor, hoping for one of Millicent's rare allowances of affection.

“Here kitty kitty,” he tries. 

No response, as usual. He can only be proud of this. 

“Well, then,” he says, stung despite himself. “I'm off now. Be good for BB-9. I've left plenty of dinner for you.”

Surprisingly, just as he is about to withdraw, two nimble ginger-banded paws appear from under the bed skirt to bat at his outstretched fingers. Awed, he tries to stroke one, tentatively, with his forefinger - but is met by an annoyed yowl and a quick-fire swipe of claws.

Hux smiles at the new scratch marks on the back of his hand.  

“Alright,” he says fondly, “Goodbye to you then.”

Peavey gives him a bland look when he reappears, punching the hydraulic doors shut behind him.

“Was that a cat I heard in your quarters, sir?”

“Don't be absurd,” Hux says, flicking a stray ginger hair off his placket and setting off at a rapid clip.  

 

Unfortunately, on their way to the bridge they encounter Kylo Ren.

Ren stops abruptly in the suspicious way he has when he doesn’t want anyone to know he has been deliberately sliding on the polished floor. But Hux has seen the closed feed footage. And he has included the scuffs in a report he is compiling entitled _Sole Commandership: A Budgetary Advantage_.

Ren, never one to leave well enough alone when he can smell blood in the atmo, straightens up and makes to approach.

 _Sweet merciful kriff_. The pills he swallowed earlier suddenly feel like they’re stuck and twice their size in his throat. He snatches the datapad out of Peavey’s hand and busies himself with it so that he doesn’t have to watch the Knight’s long, ominous strides eat up the length of the hallway.

Ren comes to stop directly in front of him, looming somehow even though they are of a height, breathing softly behind his ridiculous mask. He smells like ozone, which means he has either been sensibly slashing away at training dummies in the quarters Hux requisitioned for that purpose, or he has been sticking his laser sword into Hux’s state-of-the-art consoles.

Hux makes a show of fussing with the datapad screen, rubbing at a smear with his cuff. Ren, of course, withstands this treatment for all of two seconds before he cracks.

“ _General Hux_.”

Hux does not look up. “Oh? Is there another general on my ship I’m somehow unaware of?”

“ _What?_ ”

“Pardon,” Hux corrects.  

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

“Yes, that too.”

“ _What—_ ” Ren growls.

“Oh dear, there you go again.”

The vocoder crackles warningly - Ren about to have one of his tantrums. Hux sincerely hopes he is reminding his co-commander of his mother – if his species even has mothers.

Hux is almost certain Ren is human. Not because of any tell or behavior, but because of one particularly disturbing rumor Hux has heard regarding an incident of Ren manifesting himself in the gang showers and causing panicked members of gamma shift to evacuate. The same incident also generated a spate of rumors about Snoke’s terrifying and naked apprentice being decidedly human. And male. And forcing Hux to contemplate the image of the Knight carrying his lightsaber around in a shower caddy.

Of course, no one is forcing _him_ to take shore leave. Actually, Hux is not entirely sure that Ren's stationing aboard the _Finalizer_ _isn't_ some form of shore leave. He certainly seems to be enjoying himself – if enjoying oneself can be quantified in terms of equipment destroyed and personnel terrorized. 

“What is it that you want, Ren?” he huffs finally. “I have work to do elsewhere.” He does not say that his work is relieving himself of work. 

Ren makes an amused noise that he knows Hux hates. He made the same noise when they were first introduced to each other. Hux had said, “General Hux. Welcome aboard the _Finalizer_.” And Ren - Ren had given him a long dismissive look through the visor of his helmet, and made that noise, and clipped him in the shoulder as he stomped past. 

How Hux longs for those early days when Ren disdained to speak to him.

“ _I came to see you off, General_ ,” Ren says. 

Underneath the distorting growl of the vocoder Ren's speaking is stilted, words mangled around in his mouth like hard candy, consonants labored. He is only ever fluent when he is being petulant or sarcastic - an indulgent form of humor that would have had Hux nursing a bloodied lip if he applied it within earshot of Brendol. Whoever raised Kylo Ren did a piss poor job of it. 

Hux makes sure his expression neutral. “How kind.”

 _“Perhaps you ought to consider a security detail,”_ Ren says slowly. _“Sal Pathita is a dangerous town. For a novice.”_

He is referring to the port town's proliferation of brothels, gambling dens, and non-partisan drinking establishments. Potentially it's reputation as an active smuggler pit stop. Hux didn't choose Sal Pathita. He just chose a drop time which happened to be on rotation to Sal Pathita as opposed to one of the other dozen or so shore leave destinations sanctioned by the Order. In terms of popularity among his troopers, it ranks about 5th, which at least means that the probability of encountering another Order member once his drop group disperses is relatively low.

“Familiar with port towns are we, Ren?”

Ren tilts his head but otherwise doesn't rise to the bait. “ _More so than you, I think._ ”

Hux tries to parse whether the Knight is threatening him. Ren was present in the throne room when Snoke handed down his decision. It is possible that he also guessed at the double meaning in his master's instructions.

He narrows his eyes. “I'll manage.”

 _“I wouldn't be so sure, General.”_ He looms even closer – a frankly childish attempt at intimidation. Hux tries to side-eye Peavey - Ren really is objectively obnoxiously close - but the Captain has rather smartly managed to put about 20 feet between them. Ren continues, undeterred. _“It's been a long time, and not all the world is something you can control.”_

“Not yet.”

The vocoder makes a rattling sound that Hux is afraid is a laugh. _“Careful, General.”_

“Noted. Is there anything else? Any dire force predictions you wish to make about my shore leave?”

Ren stills. For a moment he considers that Ren might be contemplating using his sorcery on him. He has seen its aftermath - on the slumped bodies of Resistance fighters post-interrogation, and also in the livid bruising on various members of his crew that Ren takes umbrage to. But as far as he knows he is off limits. Now he imagines he can feel something crawling, down from his scalp and down the neck of his shirt. He's not sure if Ren is holding him still or if he is just paralyzed with uncertainty. But he does know that he is suddenly and instinctually afraid - his body's autonomous response to a predator. 

There is nothing he can do about the line of cold sweat at his temple so he schools his voice to be calm. “Ren.” 

“ _You mock the Force, and yet you have no concept of what it can do.”_

He feels the first tentative push of something dark and huge at the edges of his mind. A taste like sucking on magnets. 

“Get out.”

 _“The things I can see.”_ Ren raises his hand, two gloved fingers poised to stab Hux in the eye. He makes a twisting motion and Hux feels something unfurl and shake loose behind his brow. It's a confusing sensation - gentle pressure, a kind of wrong that sends nausea spiraling through him. He can only focus on the tips of Ren's fingers and controlling his own breathing. He hopes his mouth is not open, that he is not panting. Another string of odd clicks from the mask - Ren's smothered laughter.  _“All the foul secrets you keep in that skull of yours.”_

“I don't keep secrets,” Hux lies through grit teeth. 

 _“Oh?”_ Ren draws impossibly closer, his tattered cowl blocking out the hall, the metal of his helmet cold where it brushes Hux's cheek. Then he sings, softly, into Hux's ear:  

 _“Here kitty kitty.”_  

The words are like a spike driven into the base of his spine. Somehow he unfreezes - manages to get his bare hands up so that he can push past the knight, breaking for Peavey at a humiliatingly skittish pace.

He determinedly doesn't look back but Ren's sorcery is like clammy web he can't shake off all the way to the bridge. 

_Enjoy your time alone, General._

 


	2. Daydrinkers of the First Order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux touches down in Sal Pathita. Kylo Ren is definitely not there too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Get ready for the worst small talk of YOUR LIFE.

The journey to Sal Pathita is straightforward: a constellation of short sequential jumps to the Corellian Trade Spine and then a straight course down the hyperway to the planet of Foless. It is not dissimilar from the navigation exercises one encounters in the Academy's entry-level sims – albeit piloting an atmospheric assault lander and not a kriffing party boat.

Nevertheless, after he has stowed his duffel in the officer's overhead and fired off a comm to Mitaka instructing him to use all available resources to prevent that deranged wizard, Kylo Ren, from killing his cat, he spends as much time as he justifiably can standing over the cockpit, glaring out the viewport and pretending he is supervising their flight course while the two pilots sweat nervously.

He wonders what kind of idiocy is taking place already on the command bridge of his _Finalizer_.

The handover itself was perfunctory. Hux addressed his crew, logged his status in the master console, and surrendered his comm and access cylinders to Acting Commander Edrison Peavey. On the long and defeated walk back to the hangar, Mitaka supplied him with a credit chip and hotel card, nattering on about his own experiences with shore leave on Canto Bight, and taking full advantage of Hux’s sudden lack of authority to tell him to shove a sock in it. He’d almost clambered into the shuttle with Hux, prompting Hux to momentarily entertain a hare-brained scheme involving switching places with the feckless lieutenant, but ultimately he settled for gesturing for Mitaka to get off the karking ramp.

Hux sighs and digs his knuckles into his tired eyes. His mind turns again to the priority objective of this trip:

Inspiration. Fresh perspective.

Hux is of the opinion that both of these things could be achieved without company. ‘It’s lonely at the top’ is an idiom that Hux has always taken to be encouraging. Once you get to the top, you can be alone. Of course, Snoke torpedoed this hope when he saddled Hux with a co-commander.

Kylo Ren. That ridiculous aberration of mood disorders and hokey theatre. Hux is all for creative solutions to the obstacles that plague the Order. His promotion was a creative solution! A technologist, a modernist given the full run of an army on the basis of his ideas. His zeal. But Hux has an extensive portfolio of achievements in support of this unprecedented hierarchical shift.

Ren has a skull in an ashtray and a bad attitude.

And Hux has to treat him as if he is his equal.

The most insulting layer to the whole shambles is that Kylo Ren is also a man who clearly and demonstrably wants to be alone. Hux can almost envy the degree to which his body language telegraphs  _get out of my way_. Hux would love to adapt that kind of repulsive aura for his own purposes, but he could never approximate the righteous stomping gate exclusive to sulking teenaged boys like Ren does. 

Unwillingly, his thoughts turn to his own childhood. And his mother. 

His mother had been a tart. And ugly.

And because Arkanis didn’t have much in the way of an ugly tart market, she moonlighted as a cook - which was how she ended up in the staff kitchens of Brendol Hux, who had the poor fortune after several stiff drinks to go looking for a midnight snack one night. An impulse which would precipitate the singular act of negligence resulting in Hux’s conception.

Hux knew all about the act of negligence itself because his mother, Geriette, was a chronic drunk and loudmouth, and was prone to recounting the event in fond and graphic detail without provocation and to anyone within earshot, which was invariably her son.

On giving birth to a pinch-faced, tow-haired baby boy, his mother had received a small monthly pension and an apartment in the muddiest, most anonymous corner of Arkanis City Brendol could stuff her in. The apartment was small, and gray, and dim, and Hux remembers keenly how the rain rattled against the loose window fittings all day and all night. The pension was enough to feed them but not to drink off, so Geriette went back to work as soon as he was able to nurse himself.

On good days – usually classified as days he didn’t have to listen to her get plowed by one of her “friends” – she would tell him about the legacy she wanted for him, the legacy her father had passed down to her in the form of a Millicentium Copper pin that she affixed to his shirt. She wanted him to be quiet and polite, straight-backed, and well-brushed until his hair was gleaming and distinct. She wanted him to impress his father so that they could go live together in the manor house he was eternally building for them on the sunnyside.

But most of the time her favorite hobby was reminding Hux of just how clever she had been to secure him his grand pedigree - the anemic bastard son of some disremembered imperialist. Like she hadn’t just had her hands too full of soap and dishes to bother getting the commander off of her.

Hux had only seen the man who was his father once, after his mother had sent some no-doubt amateur missive threatening to notify the commander’s wife. His impression of Brendol Hux when he finally laid eyes on him was this: weak chin, thinning hair, and a drab imperial surcoat pulled tight around his paunch. Hux (who was not even a Hux at that time) had nothing of his, and everything of his mother's, as he had feared. 

Two young officers in their sharp uniforms had waited outside the door while he surveyed their bare living area.

“Maratelle knows about the boy,” he said finally. “Who do you think pays for this apartment?”

“Will you take a cup of tea, sir?” his mother demurred in place of an answer. She had made Hux run out to purchase the tea service earlier that morning and they’d spent all day spit polishing it until it didn’t look so secondhand.

“I won’t come here again,” the commander said. “There won’t be a second warning.”

And then he left without so much as a glance in his son’s direction.

It was a glimpse. Just a glimpse and a handful of words. It was enough to know what he was missing.

Later that day, after his mother had flown into one of her rages and subsided to drinking and pulling her hair out, Hux approached her for the finishing blow.

“You lied,” he said, taking the pin off and putting it on the table between them. “He’s not coming back for us”.

Geriette’s eyes were unfocused, hateful, the same pale mercury as his own. Her fingers were slack around a bottle of _Captain’s Special_. “He is!”

“No. You don’t get it. He’s not coming back for us. For you.”

He saw the insult land – burrow under all the delusions and bluster, at the hidden raw part of her that knew a lot of hurtful truths. He expected her to yell; to burst into tears and make a show of slamming around their small kitchen before stomping out into the rain and returning with some filthy half-humanoid to keep her company. It was the sort of behavior that had poisoned him with contempt for her in the first place.

But she didn’t do any of this, although her mouth still wobbled.

“Armitage,” she said. “One day you’re going to be alone too. And I hope – I _really hope_ , that you have someone else there, to be alone with.”

_Someone. Someone to be alone with..._

_As-kriffing-if_ , Hux thinks viciously. His mother was an unmitigated trollop and a lackwit. The only lesson he learned from her was ambition. And even then, his ambitions are slightly more sophisticated than finding some bloated patron to bankroll him so he can flap around a manor house getting day drunk for the rest of his life.

After his promotion and Brendol’s untimely demise-by-bug, he’d received a parcel from her with the pin inside and a flimsi requesting 10,000 credits. He’d smelted the pin down into the wiring of his retractable blade and sent her 50,000 credits. On the proviso that she never try to contact him again.

He sincerely hopes that she has since used that money to efficiently drink herself dead.

One of the pilots interrupts his thoughts. “Sir, we’re about to jump to the first hyperlane if you’d like to take a seat.” She makes some sort of communication to her co-pilot via strenuous eye contact, who nods his agreement at Hux after a beat. 

“Ah - yes,” Hux says, caught on the back foot – and then because he can’t help himself: “Good work. Maintain present course.”

He heads back to the shuttle cab, resigning himself to a place on the bench.

The shuttle cab is just as abysmally small and cramped as he suspected. His drop-mates are an eclectic mix of men and women, some still in stormtrooper armor and others already changed into their vacation-wear, flouting protocol. Hux's protocol. The jovial atmosphere sputters out as he takes his seat at the end of one of two parallel durasteel benches. The hull is narrow enough that his knees knock against those of the young officer across from him as the shuttle vibrates in preparation for a jump. Other than the rattle of armor and subdued flight checks from the pilots the transport is silent. 

The young officer catches his eye.

“Sir. Your cap, sir,” he says, gesturing at his own sandy hair.

Hux doffs his command cap and sets it primly on his lap. It probably won’t play to waltz into Sal Pathita as a distinctive officer of the First Order. The transport lurches and rattles as they make another jump, then plateaus into the calm quiet of hyperspace. 

“Have you been to Foless before, Officer...?”

“Officer Farrogit, sir,” the young man pipes up. He’s openly blushing at being addressed by Hux, which is understandable. As the engineer of the stormtrooper program and a notable figure within the Order, Hux naturally attracts the admiration of his staff. According to the most recent internal poll, he is also considered passing attractive - an upright, proud son of the Order with immaculate bearing. Still, Hux didn’t get to where he is today by uncontrollably blushing whenever a superior officer so much as glanced at him. Innocence is emphatically not a virtue in their world.

“No sir,” Farrogit says, still blushing, “It’s my first time.”

This represents the most small talk Hux has subjected himself to in the last seven years so he just nods, then tilts his head back and pretends to sleep.

Of course, because Hux would never actually allow himself to sleep outside of his designated sleep window, he busies his mind with the unending work of refining his superweapon. He doesn’t have a name for it yet – doesn’t want to get attached to something still pending finance approval. It’s surprisingly difficult to convince a panel of ex-imperialists to endorse a remote-controlled planet that zooms around vaporizing things. He’d ended up having to compromise on his values and allow Snoke to head up marketing for the project among his own hermetical dark benefactors, and to that end his life’s work would probably end up yoked with a name like Doom Ball, or the Vader-izer. And in any case, he and his physicists have run into a stumbling point – they haven’t found a way to stabilize the harnessed solar within the planet’s containment field. All simulations thus far have resulted in his doom ball popping like a water balloon.

At some point he must actually tune out because when he comes to his drop-mates seem to have overcome their nervous decorum and are engaged in a heated conversation about fucking.

“—you idiot! I’d take a run at a rathtar before I put my dick near that steel trap,” one of the troopers is saying.

Hux feels his ears prick up. Part of him reflexively wants to assert his authority and shut the lewd talk down. The other, apparently morbid part of him wants to know who it is they are talking about.

“Oh I don’t know,” says the trooper on Hux’s right. “You’ve seen the Captain spar - I wouldn’t mind seeing what those thighs can do outside of a headlock.”

Hux swallows. Surely they aren’t talking about Phasma. He once saw her punch a sparring dummy’s head clean off. And they’re designed not to do that.

“Hey,” a female trooper says, good-naturedly ribbing the trooper in the side. “We know you’re not picky, Hardy. You’ll ride anything with a cunt.”

“Trust me boys, when you’re with a woman like that,  _you’re_ the one with the cunt.”

Hux is mortified to realize that the person who has just spoken is Farrogit, the blushing innocent. He makes a mental note to have everyone aboard thoroughly reconditioned.

The conversation detours into several more unsavory topics, mostly in the vein of one-upmanship. Hux, who has no point of reference for what two human bodies are capable of, let alone what’s possible with a non-humanoid, is deeply suspicious of the truth of most of the repartee. He also cannot speculate as to why half of the troopers jokingly refer to Officer Farrogit as “the Fist”.

Logically the talk next turns to the short list of persons aboard his ship the troopers are determined _not_ to engage in sex with. This topic of conversation is interspersed with frequent awkward silences from which he might infer they are pointing at him in warning. The list is populated mostly by higher ranked officers - who the troopers deem graysuits - like Kaplan and Datoo, and unfortunates like the lower-deck janitor they call the walking birthmark.

As Hux listens to several of the group having an animated argument about despoiling Petty Officer Thanisson, he wonders if he shouldn’t have made some sort of clinical effort at experiencing the act with a member of his crew, just to stay abreast of current attitudes and motivations among his employees.

He denounces that thought almost as quickly as it surfaces. Sex is an open door to a lockbox of potential weaknesses Hux is not willing to acknowledge or explore. He makes a show of straightening up in his seat, awake, and enjoys the immediate and oppressive silence in the cab for the rest of the trip.

 

The sound of the rain pelting their small shuttle as it enters the atmosphere over Sal Pathita proper is almost deafening. His drop-mates immediately start commiserating as they fumble for their gravity aids. They will need to buy umbrellas now, one of them complains, and slushboots, and their plans to tour the spice mines further out will need to be postponed, and why wasn’t this included in the advisory.

Of course, the rain doesn’t bother Hux - because he is from a notoriously waterlogged planet, yes, but also because he plans to see out his shore leave in his hotel room.

The air outside the shuttle is hot and tangy and he turns his face up to the rain as they disembark, hitching his duffel tighter under his shoulder to protect it from the damp. His uniform provides some defense against the wet - beads of water wicking over the dense fabric - but it is also stifling in the humidity and his belt is starting to pinch. It is 15:00 and his leave is well and truly in effect. With a bolstering breath he follows the convoy of troopers and officers fleeing across the tarmac.

It turns out their accommodations – a gleaming black needle of a hotel - are located just off the main thoroughfare in the center of the entertainment district. Hux surmises that it has been selected for First Order use because of its proximity to the spaceport, but also because the building itself is sleek and black and the Order likes sleek black things. Hux certainly does.

He waits outside the lobby for the others to disperse before entering a lift pod activated by his hotel card, which transports him directly to his suite.

It’s ostentatiously large compared to his quarters aboard the _Finalizer_ , and there are more surfaces on which to sit, lie, or recline than any one man could possibly need. There is a silky looking chaise lounge at the foot of an enormous raised bed, which is completely superfluous, and a wall-to-wall screen playing a loop of Sal Pathita’s tourist offerings, which as far as Hux can determine, is getting lightly drunk among very smiley mixed-species company. The first thing he does after putting his bag down is fish the wires out from behind the screen panel and use the knife from his boot to sever the power. The screen goes blissfully dark.

With no pressing tasks to occupy his time he decides to take a shower.

Showering is Hux’s sole vice. Being able to put his head under hot, running water is the only thing he truly misses about planet-side dwelling. Like many of the folk raised on starships and thus characteristically vitamin deficient, he has fair, thin skin predisposed to piss blood at the slightest trauma, and sonics make him feel like a peeled grape, so he can admit that this particular feature of leave is something which he does actually fantasize about on occasion. 

The hotel ensuite is just as gaudy and impractical as his room. The shifting topaz holotiles give the impression of standing inside a solar storm, which he’s on the fence about. He decides that if he does not find any better entertainment tonight he will pull apart the showerhead and its many detachable features for inspection.

With brisk military efficiency he strips out of his boots and breeches, thumbing over the stripes on his uniform sleeve as he shucks out of that and his shoulder pauldrons too. He smells quite rank, he realizes – evidence of his vaccinations having reached the end of their half-life maybe, but he is also tainted with motor oil, cold sweat from the encounter with Ren, and the general unavoidable funk of being trapped in a small vehicle with a dozen stormtroopers. He avoids looking in the mirror and steps under the water.

It turns out the pounding, relentless water pressure is just about worth the trip. Hux scours away the worst of the muck with a handful of complimentary sani-gel and then settles on a pleasantly woodsy scented soap and goes about sudsing from his neck to his toes. He rinses off and then does it again, taking account of all his body’s minor tensions and complaints and trying to think of nothing at all which of course means that he thinks of his work.

After a good time in the steam he heads back to the room – determinedly naked after considering his surroundings for a moment: no droids, no crew on his door comm waiting to report  – and pulls his civvies out of their wrapping as he towels and powders dry. 

They are lamentably even brighter than he remembers: shades of overdyed vermillion. At the time, the Order’s secondary color seemed the best concession he could make when pressured into buying non-regulation duds from the pushy Nabooian merchant. Now he regrets he didn't opt for something more discreet.

It turns out the clothes are disconcertingly comfortable too. Hux is used to the stiff, unforgiving lines of his uniform doing half the work of his posture for him. These trousers are soft and stretchy, and cling all the way down. They don’t even slightly fill out his boots around the calf. The shirt is sleek and sleeved like his uniform jacket, but unlined. The high-necked leather jacket has a concealed inner pocket for his credit chip, which is agreeable. He leaves the buttery-soft red gloves on the bed.

He does another lap of the room, inspects the contents of several drawers, unpacks his book and puts it decisively on one of the Laroon-wood side tables, and then sits down on the edge of the bed platform while he deploys his second gravity aid.

For a respectable amount of time he tries tinkering with the blueprints for his superweapon, sketching out a model on the pad of flimsi provided by the hotel – but the sounds of music and revelers outside his window are too distracting. The distant sound of children laughing is not conducive to designing planet-killing super canons, even if it does make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

A look at his chrono tells him that it is 16:10. He wonders if it is too soon to comm Mitaka for a status report.

After 10 more minutes of increasingly desperate procrastination he crams his gloves on and goes in search of a bar.

 

As he makes his way down the main street he rationalizes that he is really just going in search of the spiritual home of his father. Brendol spent every hour he wasn’t tormenting cadets patronizing any establishment with a license to pedal propulsor fuel, after all.

The street outside is pleasantly uncrowded thanks to the unforecast rains, and still completely overwhelming for the part of Hux’s brain that takes pleasure in order and uniformity. Overhead, hastily erected parasols of orange and blue keep the worst of the rain off the vendors’ stalls. Despite his initial misgivings over his choice of clothing, he must look suitably unassuming because merchants and spruikers keep stepping into his path, even going so far as to grab him at the elbow. This is how Hux ends up with a large skewer of grilled tubers and a string of chewy sweet fral pearls being ushered into a cantina.

The bar is comfortingly dimly-lit. Arched stucco columns and a handful of small tables circle a sunken lounge and central bar crowded with mostly human clientele. Hux doesn’t recognize any faces as he passes, trailing his host to an encouragingly shadowy table with an unobstructed eye line to the auxiliary bar.

He flags the bardroid for a drink with what might be a slightly too imperious gesture. The selection is vast so he settles for the most expensive cactus liqueur on the menu, which turns out to be a milky purple. He grimaces and knocks it back and orders a nice safe Tevraki whiskey.

Hux considers his company while he sips at his drink and finishes the last of his fral. There’s a rather large party of men and women in matching pilot drabs celebrating something in the sunken lounge and the noise level of the cantina rises and falls with their laughter. The other tables are mostly populated by couples but there are a smattering of solo strangers too – one reading a book with his elbow on the table, another toying with the lines of condensation left by his glass.

There’s also the matter of the dark hooded figure stood at the bar staring directly at Hux.

“This one taken?”

Hux starts. It’s one of the pilots – a woman with short dark hair and two pints hooked around the fingers of one hand.

Hux feels all the spit leave his mouth. “No. Obviously…not.”

This is apparently charming enough because she slumps into the seat across from him and slides one of the pints across the tabletop.

“You can ditch the whiskey in that. Not sure how good it will taste but if you neck it fast enough who cares, right?”

“No, thank you,” Hux says, meaning the suggestion to pour his 60-credit whiskey in her 4-credit bluelager. When she reaches out to snatch back her pint glass, offended, he lightly touches her hand. _Inspiration_ , he thinks bracingly. “I prefer to take my time.”

She snorts but her eyes soften. “Alright then,” she says, sitting back. “I’m Tee. Those are my flyboys over there. We’re celebrating the end of school. What brings you here?”

Hux takes a sip of the bluelager. It’s about as terrible as it looks. “Company policy,” he says, working with half-truth in case this flirtation becomes progressively more intricate. “I was apparently in need of a holiday.”

“No shit.”

“Excuse me?”

She laughs. “I said no shit. You seem kinda…” She makes the universal gesture for wound up.

It’s quite presumptuous of her to draw that conclusion of him after such a short exchange, he thinks, affronted, and just because he’s the only person in here capable of sitting without touching the chairback.

“Relax,” she says, flopping her hand at him. “That’s what we’re all here for, right - to unwind? Buy me a drink or ten and I’m not gonna hold it against you.”

She nods at her empty glass.

Hux orders them each two whiskey rocks and she swallows both of hers so fast that he’s forced to order a jug of foamy lager just to slow her down. Of course this means that he is also manners bound to partake in the foul beverage himself once he finishes his liquor. Before he knows it his shoulders feel heavy enough that he’s slumping back in his chair with his knees out – a telltale lapse of posture indicating that he is well and truly en route to being intoxicated. 

At some point her flyboy friends come to interrupt and introduce themselves. One of them is so drunk he is non-verbal. One of them is shooed off for eyeing Hux nastily and trying to offer Tee a glass of water. One of them forces Hux to play a round of arm wrestling, which Hux wins thanks in large part to his regular arm wrestling practice with a much more proficient partner; but it turns out –and Tee and her companion insist- that on Foless, it is customary for the _winner_ to drink. So he does.

Eventually they’re a twosome again, and he’s sauced. And…enjoying himself. Tee is good company. She keeps him in liquor, makes no excuses for running up his credit chip to their mutual enjoyment, and seems to be enjoying his flirting – which is admittedly just repurposed blaster puns. As it has grown hotter in the cantina she has also stripped and tied her brown flightsuit around her waist and suddenly Hux is aware that she is a woman, with a small tender mouth and soft, enticing cleavage, and not anything like his mother, and interested in him in a way that women can be interested in men.

And he is a man. 

“Uh,” he says. “It’s quite late?”

She reaches across the table and pulls on a hank of his hair. Coincidentally he remembers that he forgot to pomade it back. “What you getting at, Red?” He takes a fortifying sip of his drink and opens his mouth to propose…something, but she beats him to it. “You want to find somewhere else?” she says, chin propped on her knuckles; playful, coquettish.

He swallows. _Inspiration_ , he thinks.

“Yes.”

Her grin is knowing. “Gimme a click. I’ll go work on the Red Guard over there.” She jerks her head in the direction of her pilot friends.

Hux fights down a surge of sudden drunkenness as he gets to his feet and goes in search of a bathroom. It’s empty apart from a young man pissing noisily and unabashedly in the sink. He claps Hux on the shoulder on the way out - a threat or a commendation, Hux can't be sure and doesn't much care. He uses the toilet, rucks up his sleeves, washes his hands and goes to tidy his hair in the mirror.

And is struck dumb.

He looks—

If he had known red could look so particularly bad with his hair color, he would not have chosen it. 

He looks frightfully drunk. And unassuming. Rawboned. Without the added structure of his uniform he is quite narrow – small, were it not for his height and angular shoulders. His uncoiffed hair is soft and tousled where the girl had her fingers in it - lighter without the pomade, he realizes.  He looks flushed around the cheeks. His jacket and shirt are tugged open - when did he do that? - and he can see that he is flushed there too. He looks a hundred years away from the type of man who could bark orders over a command bridge. He looks too _young_. _Stars_ , how did he fraud his way into the role of General? Who would give someone this young control of a ship?! He stares back aghast at his over-wide eyes, leans in to see the pupils expanding.

He thinks of what he is about to do. The way the troopers talked about it - like conquest. Conquest is a concept he understands well. And this – this thing he has gotten into doesn’t feel like surrender or vulnerability. It feels like it could be _power_.

 _Enjoy your time_ alone _, General._

Hux sneers at the mirror, enjoying the stretch of his slightly numb cheeks. Kriff him. Hux will have company if he wants it. He has always been adept at making personal sacrifices for a greater goal. He will approach this just the same if it means shaking off the last vestiges of self-doubt.

He tugs his gloves back on and goes to the bar to settle up - a negligible amount of credits really, compared to the cost of some of the equipment he has had commissioned for his ship.

When he gets back to the table, it has been taken over by an amorous couple. And Tee is not there.

He waits nearby for a minute before other patrons start shooting him unnervingly pitying looks, and decides the best strategic move is to do a lap of the central bar. Which is how he realizes that all the pilots are gone. Except for the one who had angrily tried to sober Tee up. And Hux can’t ask him where Tee is because she is wrapped around him with her tongue down his throat.

Hux’s good mood evaporates like a deflector shield losing power. He’s so humiliated he wants to blow himself out an airlock.

"You can’t space all your problems," Phasma had once said to him. And she was right.

But he is beginning to believe he can drink them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Go check out the heartbreakingly amazing art by koujaaku of [Hux](http://koujaaku.tumblr.com/post/174710368004/he-looks-frightfully-drunk-and-unassuming) checking his drunk ass out in the mirror.


	3. Hook ‘em Catch ‘em

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux tries to outrun inspiration. 
> 
> (Or: Local First Order Man Starts To Unwind Is Still a Huge Buzzkill)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:
> 
> The face I made immediately after posting this was literally the Jim Halpert/Office face Domhnall Gleeson is making in the [TLJ gag reel](http://momoformisha.tumblr.com/post/172340533462/cloudyfacewithjam-armitage-hux-domhnall)

Hux snaps into wakefulness - quick and violent, still mired in his time at the Academy. He is hungover. Catastrophically so, in his estimation, and he can quantify such a thing because he has diarized two hangovers of note in his life so far and neither of them have involved waking up in the act of vomiting on himself.

He sits up out of reflex, catching the worst of the vomit in his hands, which turns out to be a tactical error – both the sitting up part and the catching hot bile part. He gives himself a moment to breathe shakily, trying not to smell anything that might set him off again, and taking stock of his surroundings.

He is in his hotel room - fully clothed except for one vanished glove, and on top of the covers, and there is _sand_ all over his boots. His room door has been left wide open - the lift pod attached to it beeping furiously at having been stalled. His duffel bag is also on the bed with him, overflowing with the viscera of his hastily stuffed possessions as if he’d given up partway through.

He meditates on the state of his asshole. He doesn’t think he has been sodomized.

In a state of disorientation he scoots down to the edge of bed and goes to the ensuite sink with his hands held up like a supplicant. Once he has rinsed his face and sponged the worst of the sick off his shirt he hunts down a bacta patch and places it carefully over the ugly-looking bruise on his jaw then goes to lie back down on the chaise lounge – which he can admit now is really quite wonderful. 

Prodding at the void of his memories is like tonguing at a sore tooth and his mind shies away fast, so after an hour of reclining and waiting for the bacta to do its work, he settles on an itinerary of retrieving his missing glove from the cantina and hijacking the transport shuttle back to the _Finalizer_ early. 

The street outside is blue with new morning light, air still thick and boiling underneath swollen clouds. Droids and shop owners are cleaning up the debris from some sort of festival – cups and petals like confetti. The usual parade of hawkers and salesmen jump into his path, pawning cooked breakfast and dubious-looking cure-alls. The smell rattles his stomach. He keeps his eyes on the ground and his mouth sealed shut against stimuli.

He’s almost at the steps of the cantina when he fetches up hard against a moving obstacle - one that grabs him around the arms to prevent him from ricocheting backwards. He looks up, annoyed. The obstacle is just a man, albeit a big one.

“Fuck off!” he says, knocking the stranger's hands off him.

“You could thank me,” the man supplies, blocking Hux’s path. He’s grinning expectantly. It makes him look like something Hux wants to stomp on.

“Pass,” Hux says dismissively, shoving him to the side.

“Hey!” the man shouts in his wake.

He’s in luck. The cantina is open despite the early hour. He knocks the worst of the sand off his boots and makes to punch the door mechanism.

“They won’t let you in there,” his stalker says from behind him.

“Oh, and why is that?” Hux asks, suppressing an eye roll and turning around.

“This, probably,” the man says, holding up Hux’s missing glove.

 

It turns out the stranger’s name is Ben and he and Hux go way back. And by way back, Ben explains, as they queue for a breakfast establishment, he means they were kicked out of the cantina together.

“How much do you remember?” he asks as they’re waved inside and seated. He puts Hux’s glove on the table between them, the price of this conversation. Hux turns it over and then slips it on, flexing his hand, buying time to think. This stranger – Ben – knows him. He knows Hux’s real name, which means that at some point last night Hux was drunk enough to give it. He currently holds the winning cards in a game Hux doesn’t even remember starting.

Hux does a cursory assessment of him. He’s young - younger than Hux. Roughly the same height but drawn along bolder lines. His clothing is non-descript, black, no design or insignia to denote a profession or affiliation. He has a low-tenor, musical voice and large, dangerous-looking hands, and he holds himself with a quiet confidence that makes Hux uneasy. Hux considers his question from earlier. What does he remember?

Well, to begin with, he remembers dancing…

 

The dancing was not his own. It belonged to an incredibly drunk sullustan who was apparently trying to seduce Hux. Hux, unsurprisingly, was not one for dancing or for sullustans, so he knocked back the last of his whiskey and threw the empty tumbler at it. Several patrons gasped as the glass shattered on the floor but he was already spinning around on his stool, propping his elbows on the bar and signaling the droid for another.

At some point the bar had started blasting irksome drum music out of its overhead speakers so that the few dedicated drinkers were forced to huddle together in packs to speak over the noise. He had spent the better part of the last hour trying to get drunk enough to not care how or who with he acquired the requisite carnal knowledge, but the more he indulged the more the others avoided his gaze.

Except for the man across the bar glowering at him like Hux was responsible for blowing up his home planet. Hux raised a glass to him. _Here’s hoping_.

“You’re lonely.”

Hux swiveled to glare at the voice. It was a man this time – young, dark-haired and smooth-cheeked. He was wrapped provocatively in the brown and white robes of an ascetic.

“How can you tell?” Hux asked around the lip of his glass, fighting his better instinct to bark at the silly twat to leave him alone.

“It’s just something I can...sense."

“Ah,” said Hux, unimpressed. “A force sensitive.”

The man nodded. “My name is Kai." He leaned unnecessarily close to speak in Hux's ear. “Are you familiar with The Force?” Hux just _knew_ he was saying it with a capital - ‘The Force’ - like Kylo Ren, the vile charlatan.

“More than I want to be,” Hux said, taking a long draught of whiskey, hoping his blackout would hurry the fuck up so he wouldn’t have to listen to any more Jedi nonsense or _to this awful kriffing music_.

Kai ran his hand down Hux’s arm. “There’s light in you,” he said.

No such luck then. Hux sucked a defeated breath in through his nostrils.

“That’s a pity,” he said. “I’d prefer there was a prick in me.”

Kai's eyesbrows shot up. “Right. Jeez buddy, that was easy.” He rapped his knuckles on the bar excitedly, giving up the pretense of mystery. “Let me just hit the head and I’ll get you outta here.”

Hux barely waited until his back was turned before pouring himself a generous serve and throwing it back. _Personal sacrifice,_ he reminded himself _. Larger goal_. 

“You’re weak like this.”

Ah, wonderful. Another unsolicited observation about the state of his headlong dive into self-ruination via coitus from a complete stranger. A peripheral glance showed him this newest assailant was the man whose planet Hux was committed to destroying: the glowerer.

“That’s the point isn’t it?” Hux said, remembering the girl’s words from earlier. “Drink yourself stupid. Find some sorry creature to see out the night with.”

“That man wants more than to see out the night with you.” 

“Yes," Hux said, nodding for emphasis. "I know.”

“He’s beneath you.”

“Of course, if that’s how he wants it,” Hux said glibly, turning to look at his conversation partner properly after an uncomfortable silence. 

Hux did not, as a rule, pay attention to people. He noticed competence, and he noticed authority. He categorized his crew by uniform, the shape and form of caps and helmets, their security clearances - officer, soldier, pilot, droid. But he did not really bother to see them as anything outside of their utility.

That was not to say that he hadn’t experienced fleeting moments of attraction before. Like when he had received his commission aboard the _Finalizer_ , and an older captain - an outspoken opponent of his father’s – had pulled him aside after the toast to say: “Commendable effort, son. You are truly an asset to the Order” and accidentally touched the bone of Hux’s wrist exposed between his jacket cuff and glove.

Or like the time with Phasma, when he had said during book club: “I think the author is telling us to look at our own faults, and through the process of learning ourselves, realize the virtue of the struggle to bring order and culture to the sub-humans.” And Phasma, who had had several glasses of port, which always made her rowdy, had said: “I disagree. And culture is unnecessary.”

However, in his inebriated state Hux could admit that there was something magnetic about this man with his thick, girlish hair, and his long, serious face dotted with moles. Hux realized, with a sudden shock, that he found him quite alluring.

The man stared back at him, dark eyes blank and consuming, looking for something. Then he grinned, a nervous-quick, predatory thing gone before Hux could even believe he’d seen it. “Is there something on my face?” he said teasingly.

“You’re very young.”

The man’s eyes creased at the corners, amused. “You think so?”

“I’m older than you.”

The man tilted his head slightly, considering. Hux started at the sudden sensation of cold leather pressed up under his chin. He hadn’t seen the man’s hand move.

With Hux’s jaw balanced gently on the end of two fingers, the stranger coaxed his face towards the light, gaze tracing over the dark shadows under his eyes, his shocked open mouth. “Yes,” he said huskily. Then he trailed the line of his fingers from under Hux’s chin, whisper-soft down his exposed throat, settling over the bobbing notch of his voice box. His eyes fixed there, studying.

“What—” Hux said, wishing he hadn’t gotten quite so drunk so that he could better control his suddenly breathy voice. "What’s your name?” 

“Ben,” the man said quietly, almost shy. 

Hux tested it in his mouth. Ben. A little pedestrian but otherwise pleasant. “Do you always grab strangers by the face?”

“You wanted me to,” he said, like it was plain. “You came here for this. Waited. Almost drowned yourself so that you could let yourself have what you want.”

Hux swallowed. If he weren’t superlatively blasted he would have slapped the insolent look off his face. “You have a filthy mouth.”

The man snorted. “I’m a ship brat,” he said.

“Liar,” Hux said without any heat. “You’re from Coruscant, or close. You speak with your tongue in the front – a Core World trait. And your vowels are too perfect. _Bra-at_ ,” he demonstrated, pointing at his own mouth.

The man’s mouth twitched at the corners, amused. “I’ve never been called too perfect before. Any other too perfect parts I should work on?” 

“Your—"

Hux realized he was about to say - _your mouth, your beautiful sulky mouth-_ and bit the words off before he could unspool the last of his dignity onto the countertop. Kark it, just how drunk was he?

“You’re thinking about kissing me,” Ben said softly, startling Hux out of his reverie. It sounded more like a revelation than a statement meant to tease, like it was something he hadn’t expected. His dark eyes flickered down to Hux’s lap.

He jerked in his seat. Surely not.

But he was - suddenly and painfully aware of the hard clench of arousal centering over his groin, of his cock filling with hot blood. 

He looked back at the man, stunned. In slow motion the seam of his lips parted, from the center out, poised to say something very good or very—

“New friend?” someone said. It was Kai, returned from the bathroom. He looked the apparent interloper over before sliding in between them to lean an insouciant elbow against the bar, ignoring the man at his back, eyes fixed on Hux. “Ready to get out of here?” 

“Alright,” Hux said, shaking off the hot cloud of arousal in favor of a sure thing. “Sod off,” he said to Ben. 

Ben’s eyes flashed with annoyance, his mouth twisting angrily. Hux felt an odd thrill shoot through his body. It really was a shame he couldn’t afford to invest the time in getting him into bed instead.

“You—”

“Why don’t you find another date, buddy,” Kai said, putting his hand on Ben’s shoulder threateningly.

Ben, as it turned out, was not Kai’s buddy. And he demonstrated this by knocking Kai’s supporting leg out from under him in a way that made him pitch face forward into the bar, helped there by Ben’s hand on the back of his neck.

Annoyed, Hux punched him in the side of the head.

Hux punched about as well as one could expect of a man of his fine build, which was to say, _viciously hard_.

“Stop,” Ben said, exasperated, trying to deflect both Hux’s next blow and Kai's incoming fist. He was doing a remarkably good job of it, but only because - by some foul witchcraft - he was managing to double himself. Hux shook his head. The two figures converged and he cocked his arm back for a chest blow. He managed to land it just under the man's ribs, but only because he was preoccupied with throwing Kai the Jedi bodily over the bar. Hux shook his head again. The rapid percussive beat of the music was in his temples, behind his eyes.

“That’s it,” he thought he heard before something popped in his jaw and he was hefted off his feet.

“Aww put him down!” someone yelled.

Fortunately for Hux, the brute attempting to bear hug him into submission was no match for his Academy training (not the official sort but the sort learned in the dormitories after lights out); Hux let fly an elbow aimed at his groin.

“Ow shit, Hux! I _knew_ you’d be like this.”

Suddenly Hux was back on his feet again and stumbling away from a renewed effort from Kai to get his face pulped by Ben as much as possible - and startlingly in time with the persistent, irritating beat of the music.

 _Kriff that music_. He snarled out his frustration. While the two men grappled, Hux grabbed his glove off with his teeth, spitting it out onto the countertop and clambering to stand on top of his stool. With no-doubt impressive grace - despite the bar moving rudely under his knees – and before the droid blustering at him to get down could impede his good progress, he reached up into the guts of the speaker system, made an effective cut loop, and drew his boot knife through the sound cable.

He must have cut the wrong wire though because the world lurched sideways and short-circuited. And there was nothing after except pitch-blackness; space without stars.

 

Hux finishes retelling his cursory version of events. Again he feels his mind scraping at the edges of the missing information - the black hole of his memories after that moment - the cutting of the wire. Ben has sat back and is studying him; mouth flexing around secrets he has obviously already decided to hold back. In the light of day Hux can see he has an alarmingly pink mouth, incongruous in his boyish face.

He puts his head in his hands, massaging his temples. While he was drifting a server has poured them each a generous serving of pale tea and the steam against his eyes is faintly humanizing. He looks up when he realizes she hasn't immediately moved away. 

“Anything else?” she asks breathily. Hux looks between her and his breakfast partner. 

 _Oh_. 

 _Well_ , he thinks grudingly. _Yes, I suppose he’s quite striking._

Ben raises an eyebrow at him. He has brown eyes. “Anything else?”

“I don’t—” _know_. He doesn’t even kriffing know where they are. He looks around the restaurant. It seems to be a sort of family-friendly place if the amount of children darting around with fishing instruments is—

_Fishing instruments?_

He looks down at the channel cut into the flooring near their feet. They are sitting alongside a neat blue moat swarming with sea creatures. His eyes dart to the assortment of dwarf fishing rods and spears hooked to the edge of their table.  

“Absolutely not,” he says. 

Ben shrugs. “I want to try killing what I eat,” he says, like a true psychopath. “I saw it on a brochure.”

“Was the brochure intended for ages nine and under?”

Ben laughs. It is…transformative. He looks quite awkward, Hux decides. A boy like him at the Academy would have been turned inside out.

To fill the silence, Hux samples his tea. It has something in it – alcohol, he realizes. He looks up to find Ben watching him, daring him to comment. Hux swallows another mouthful stubbornly. It turns out to be quite an effective balm for his pounding headache.

“You’re different,” Ben says after a moment, hefting one of the spears experimentally and leaning to the side to observe the passing prey. From last night, he means. “Pricklier.”

“I assure you, however I presented myself last night was in the spirit of self-destruction.”

“I think you just let yourself be what you wanted,” Ben says, not bothering to look up from where he is focused on the sinuous passage of his quarry in the channel. Hux hopes he’s not going to try to land some great bloody fish out of the water inches from his feet, but just as he thinks it, an overlarge newt-like creature - a Rokarian, perhaps – goes shooting past. Ben readjusts his grip on the spear, flicks it out with a lazy motion, and harpoons it.

Hux takes a scalding mouthful of tea to prevent himself from screaming.

Something urgent is trying to squirm to the front of his brain.

He sits very still, fighting down a surge of nausea as their server makes short work of their catch with two blockish knives, folding the fish into a dozen soft pleated dumplings and setting them in a steamer on their table.

“I have to go,” he says bluntly as Ben starts to serve. 

“Light or dark?” Ben says, holding up two little bottles. Without waiting for an answer he leans forward and sloshes a dark viscous-looking sauce into Hux’s bowl. Then he forks a dumpling into his mouth and leans back easily in his chair, chewing slowly. His eyes roll over Hux’s mouth and neck, down to his nervously drumming fingers and then back up.

Hux has the unnerving feeling that he is deciding what he wants to do with him. He swallows down the last of his tea. 

“You’re afraid,” he says, eyeing Hux’s fingers clenched around the empty cup.

Hux scoffs. “Of another fumbling overture from you? Hardly”

“No,” the other man says. “You’re afraid that you were a coward last night. That you didn’t kiss me like you wanted to.” He pauses, considering. “Like you want to now.”

Hux shoves his shaking hands under the table. He wants this feeling –fear?- to hurry up and transmute – to become anger, the old familiar tool he knows how to wield to his advantage. He doesn’t know what it is about this man that is sparking up against his animal brain and telling him to run but he’s not going to wait around to be harpooned.

His chair makes an obnoxious screeching noise as he stands up.

“I’m actually flattered, you know,” Ben continues. He pushes a hand through his hair, suddenly young and rakish, like he can lure Hux back into the conversation simply by shaking off his former blunt intensity. “You were pretty drunk last night. I thought maybe your hard on for me was a one-time thing.”

Hux hisses. “Be quiet!” He looks around at the other patrons, hoping their conversation hasn’t carried and he won’t have to finesse an orbital bombardment of the whole city once he gets back to the _Finalizer_.

“Look at you all stroppy just because you figured out you want my cock.”

Hux realizes with a sinking sort of dread, that the racing of his heart, the tremor in his hands, might not entirely be fear.

“I know what I want,” he snarls. 

He’s aware the moment he says it how foolish he is to engage with the topic. And he’s still standing. Their server, the moonstruck one from before, is approaching enquiringly. His companion must give her a sufficiently dissuasive look because she abruptly about faces and disappears back from whence she came.

“Ok, Hux,” Ben says, fishing another dumpling out from the basket with his fork and basting it in a truly disturbing amount of sauce. “What do you want?”

Hux frowns. He hears another voice saying those words – the echo of a dream he is already forgetting. _What do you want, Hux?_

He wants many things. He wants order: a galaxy in awe. He wants a legacy that eclipses that of his father. And power. And an equal power rising up to hold a mirror to his own. He had thought once, that that mirror was Snoke - but that had been before he'd learned that the Supreme Leader didn’t know how to terminate a holocall and was prone to badmouthing him when he thought he'd successfully disconnected.

“Maybe what I want is for you to stop stuffing your face with dumplings for one moment,” he says instead.

“Nah,” Ben says around a mouthful of food. “I think what you really want is for someone with a big cock to hold you down and fuck you.”

“Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?” Hux snaps.

That earns him a surprisingly heated glare. The man straightens up, snatching a bite of fish off the tines of his fork with such impeccable good breeding that Hux suddenly feels quite small and ugly by comparison. 

He’s leaving. He’s definitely leaving. He has been many things in the last cycle, but he will _not_ be _melodramatic_. 

“Thank you for the glove,” he says, smoothing his jacket as a gesture of finality.

He turns to leave.

“You did, you know,” Ben says to his back. “Kiss me.”

Hux’s heart stops and restarts with a lurch.

“Oh my god,” says the woman at the next table over.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:
> 
> Two personality deficients drinking rosé and reading manuals on galactic expansionism for pleasure is my new mood. 
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH for all the lovely comments!!! I'm really enjoying this whole writing thing because of you guys - even though writing "Ben" turned out to be SO FREAKIN HARD. Honestly, how the fuc* do people write mistaken identity? I thought it was supposed to be a fun trope. 
> 
> Come talk to me about the trashfire twins anytime! I also dumped a coda/flashback scene that didn't quite fit with the tone but it does explain Hux's rampant pussyfear and fit into the plot (if you think there is one) so if you like dark indulgent word garbage visit [~yonder~](http://momoformisha.tumblr.com/post/172344209817/pocket-nova-coda).


	4. It takes two to cataclysm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux has forgotten. He looks for answers. And for someone to blame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Fair warning, Hux tries to Jeff Goldblum his way into getting laid.

As far as Hux is concerned, the only civilized approach to a situation wherein one is confronted with information adverse to one’s preferred self-image – such as being accused of kissing an overgrown child with an uneven jawline and a mouth like a Zabrakian spice smuggler, and then forgetting about it like some drunken floozy - is to go on the offensive.

Which is why Hux is immediately disappointed with himself that he is instead climbing out a bathroom window.

He has the wretched poor luck to land slipshod in a pile of half-liquidated food scraps and fish skeletons, which, as it turns out, is the perfect combination to loosen his tenuous control over his gag reflex. He lunges for the alley wall beside the restaurant garbage chute, and ends up crouched in a squat, hanging his head between his knees and making a disturbing amount of eye contact with a fish head that looks disconcertingly similar to Lieutenant Mitaka.

While he tamps down on the urge to vomit, a memory comes back to him of Ben, his voice calm and cruel, familiar, his fingertips pressed against Hux’s larynx, curled around the harpoon. And underneath that, something else, a memory unbidden and saturating, like a blot of ink across flimsi: his mother’s bed knocking, arrhythmic; and other sounds, and then a voice between grunts -  _“Fuck, yeah, you wanted this, didn’t you? Someone to –fuck- take care of you”_ \- and his mother’s voice, breathless, cajoling: _“Maybe I just wanted someone with a big cock to hold me down and fuck me.”_  

Hux’s blood pounds hot in his ears. The words cycle round in his brain until he’s not even sure if the voice saying it is hers or his or—  

 _Don’t think about that_ , he tells himself. _Think about nice things._ New boots polished to a lacquered gleam. The first compulsive sip of too-hot caf in the morning. Getting back to the _Finalizer_ and sonic-ing himself into an alternate timeline where he was never held hostage in a maritime-themed restaurant. 

But he can’t stop seeing the fish; speared. The casual cruelty of it. On the ground, the fish head with its glassy eye half-levered out of the cavity looks up at him beseechingly – like how Mitaka had looked when Hux chose him to relay instructions to Ren to stop requisitioning fuel for his TIE silencer “for missions” when he was obviously just hurtling around space composing his own herald music.

He nudges the fish head with his boot and the large gelatinous eye wobbles. Kriffing shit, he is going mad. _Like Brendol_ , he realizes with grim detachment.

When Hux had decided to explore the scale of potential allergic reactions of his father to Parnassos beetles, he had had the unexpected pleasure of watching the old man scramble to deny the symptoms of his mind putrefying, to hold on to his rapidly depleting mental faculties. Towards the end, which was essentially, as Phasma had explained it, whenever Hux wanted it to be, Brendol had been tasked with overseeing a standard training sim for newly promoted officers. The old titan had dropped weight and his uniform sagged at the chest, pulled down by all his accolades as he paced the control room of the _Imperialis_ , stuttering orders and gulping at water with his back turned to the crew. Hux had caught his eyes reflected in the dark transparisteel; afraid. 

“Assault craft deployed and standing by to engage, Commander,” piped one of the lieutenants when too much time had passed since Brendol’s last instruction. Hux looked down at his console, at the formation of enemy cruisers blinking slowly out of the field of engagement on the radar.

“Excellent,” Brendol said, straightening. “Orders are to engage within range. Their shields are up but we can’t afford to give them space to flee. Prime the turbolasers. Take out their—” He stopped. "Take their—" He stopped again. One of the other lieutenants looked around wide-eyed and imploring. A sort of opportunistic ripple went through the room - blood-fed animals sensing weakness. “Their… Target their—” He gave up, snarling, clicking his fingers, impatient for the words. 

And when it had been perfectly silent except for Brendol’s balled fists creaking in their leather gloves, Hux had done him the calculated unkindness of saying, quietly, but not discretely: “Do you want us to target their sublight thrusters, sir?” - and made the first cut.

After that he wore the greatcoat, a gift and a promise grown into. And Brendol shat himself to death ignominious and confused on some backwoods planet full of warm sand and clear water.

But Brendol had been poisoned. And from the unique vantage point of knowing for a fact he had been poisoned, it seemed absurd to Hux that Brendol hadn’t been able to trace his sudden decline back to a single point of clarity – had stubbornly refused to look for the gnawing wound at the center of his failing body. Because to do so would be to acknowledge a simple truth: that he had been outplayed - and by his thin-as-a-slip-of-paper-and-just-as-useless son.

Now, thinks Hux, he is the one who has been poisoned, uncertainty taking root in his brain. And when he tries to trace his steps, to land upon that pivotal moment of betrayal, there is only this: a fish, gasping on the table; sand caked into the tread of his boots; fear like a hand clutching at his throat.

Hux swallows. He runs the back of his hand over his lips, breathing in the stabilizing smell of leather. He won’t shy away like Brendol, refusing to look for the bite, pretending he hasn’t been undone somehow. So he squeezes his eyes closed, sucking in a breath of rank-sweet air and concentrating. He used to do this to compartmentalize, to store away all the imperfect versions of himself he’d needed to climb the ladder but didn’t want to _be_ any longer. The scrappy young bastard; the hungry-eyed student; the hardened, pious son. Now he tugs at the edges of a nebulous memory, lets himself feel the nauseating heartbeat of music, the cantina plunging into darkness. In his mind he jams the two wires back together, drags it out into the searing light— 

 

He was aboard the _Finalizer_ and as he’d suspected, Peavey had let everything go to shit. The bridge was utter pandemonium - emergency lighting flashing red and indigo and sickening yellow-green. The whirring faces of his crew - perplexingly unrecognizable - shook and quadrupled before his eyes, shot through with hot lines of fluorescence; streamers of light trailing, burnt into his retinas. Non-essentials had flooded the space and their panicked voices were drowning out his attempts for order.

 _Desist at once,_  he was trying to say over the raucous. _Order on my bridge!_

“You can’t sit here, mate,” said one of his crew, nudging him with a foot.

“Insubordination,” Hux whispered.

“Oh dear. Up we get—” But the man froze suddenly, with his hands around Hux’s shoulders, frowning. Then he was lurching away somehow, and the man from the cantina – Ben - was looming over him, hair limned with glittering light.

“I told you to wait on the step, Hux.”

“It’s my ship. I’ll wait where I want.”

“You’re not on your ship. You’re on Foless. On the beach, specifically.”

Hux didn’t have an answer for that that didn’t make him want to cringe with embarrassment so he concentrated instead on breathing normally and undrunkenly.

Ben was apparently not fooled and he’d brought a dirty plastic gallon drum of water that he dumped in Hux’s lap. He waited silently while Hux drank.

When his mouth didn’t feel so much like he’d tried to suck the fuel out of a landspeeder Hux was able to take in his surroundings. He was sitting on the edge of some sort of synthwood pontoon attached to an artificial beach by a big ugly pier, empty, alone except for a pair of humanoid workers smoking in amicable silence.

Ben sat down next to him and tapped his water drum with a flask of bioluminescent _Flameout_ he himself was drinking. Hux took a large swig of water, avoiding eye contact. The rain had stopped but a damp electric charge was still in the air and the pontoon was wet under the seat of his leggings.

“Shore leave,” Ben said after a while.

“Apparently,” Hux said, not bothering to reflect on when he’d apparently ran his mouth about the First Order’s non-delegable benefits package to this stranger.

“No, I mean – it figures. That you would take it literally.” He pointed at the shore, dark and indistinct except for a string of blue halolanterns.

Looking back at the mainland allowed Hux to connect suddenly to his body, to relax into the sensation of being warmly and swimmingly drunk. He was adrift, heavy, unmoored, anonymous - no one around for fathoms who could recognize him as Armitage Hux. No one buzzing nervously in his peripheral, waiting with datapad in hand. No masked specter loitering around every corner, waiting to terrorize Hux with pseudoscience. He felt… _good_ , he realized, leaning back on his palms and letting his boots dangle, languorous, like a cat flat under a lamp.

Hux snuck a look at the other man out of the corner of his eye: standard military-issue boots (large); long thick legs, slack and open, maybe longer than Hux’s; the showy breadth of torso presented enticingly as he stretched back on his elbows, posture indifferent. Hux darted a glance at the man’s profile but found him already staring back, smiling, the lip of the flask pressed coyly into the bow of his mouth.

“Thinking about kissing me again, Hux?”

“You punched me,” Hux said by way of an answer.

Ben snorted, taking a swig of his drink. “You punched _me_. Twice. ” 

“What does it look like?” he asked, meaning the bruise. He angled his jaw towards the other man, considering how he would react if Ben touched him again.

“Like you got your ass handed to you,” Ben said, cocking an eyebrow in his direction but otherwise keeping his hands to himself.

“I would have beaten you if I was sober,” Hux said.

“I’ll let you believe that. You fight like a cheat.”

Hux scoffed. “Is it important to you that I fight like some gallant great knight? You don’t know me at all. I’m a stranger to you.”

This seemed to charm him. “Tonight and always, I think.”

“Presumptuous.”

“Try to say that without licking your lips next time.”

Hux felt his ears start to burn, a nasty little side effect he thought he’d divested himself of post-adolescence. “You think you can read me so kriffing easily.” 

“I can. You’re not so clever as you think at hiding your feelings.”

“That’s absurd. I don’t even have—”

“Feelings? And you think that’s commendable?” Ben asked, rather seriously for someone dabbling his boots in the water like a four-year-old. “Emotion can be a path to strength. Desire, loathing, jealousy… Sometimes they get you what you want.”

That was dangerously close to the sort of borderline-personality hokum that Ren and his master were constantly trying to bludgeon Hux with. As if he could seriously consider a philosophical view expounded by men whose sartorial choices ranged from slippers-as-business-wear to an actual bloody _cowl_.

Jealousy was perhaps the emotion with which he was most familiar. He couldn’t deny it was a powerful motivator. Most recently he had experienced it in regards to a request for funds needed for turret augmentation denied him in favor of Kylo Ren’s request for a dedicated meditation module. Hux had spent the better part an hour presenting blueprint designs (and an admittedly self-congratulatory spreadsheet) in the direction of Snoke’s perilously open bathrobe, and when it came time for Ren to propose his alternate bid for the funds, he’d simply said, _“Supreme Leader, it is essential that I have a room to cry in”_ \- or, Hux assumed that’s what was communicated telepathically, because Ren got his sulk dungeon and Hux got a heaping pile of fuck-all.

But jealousy had also gotten him out of bed every morning at the Academy, honing his sniper abilities until he could earn a moment of Brendol’s steely-eyed appraisal. And jealousy of his fellow officers’ silvery Inner Rim accents had had him brushing his teeth bloody in front of the mirror before bed, testing his mouth around the preferred sounds: “cruis-ah”, “bla-stah”, “mega class destroy-ah”.

“Well,” Hux said, reeling himself out of his memories. “I suppose I concede the point. Emotion can have utility. In controlled doses, perhaps.”

“Controlled chaos?” Ben’s voice was patronizing. He had closed his eyes while Hux was thinking so Hux took the opportunity to admire the long pale jut of his throat with his head tipped back, his crooked chin.

“Not as such a vague concept,” Hux said. “But yes, in theory, chaos in the form of an unstable energy reserve – quintessence for example – could be harnessed and directed, as a tool for selective destruction. Or creation," he adds. "Depending on how you look at it. Creation of order. So, order from chaos.”

“Are you talking about work?”

“Imagine!" He shook his half-empty water drum for emphasis. "A hole punched through the sub-hyperspace layer by this limitless phantom energy converted from starlight - this juggernaut. A dead sun transformed by force of will and colliding with a static system – a planet still untransformed.”

“This is about the quality of seduction I expected from you.”

“—and when the two bodies interact, the weaker one bursts and collapses. Gravitational singularity born of cataclysm. And from this barely leashed destructive power...the birth of a new star.”

“A pocket nova,” Ben said simply.

“Yes,” Hux said, a little breathless.

“Hux,” Ben said after a while. “In this metaphor about chaos. Are you imagining that you can be the one to control me?”

Hux swallowed, mouth suddenly dry again. “You don’t seem…amenable to that sort of treatment.”

That earned him a small, amused sound. “You’d be surprised.”

Hux felt the first lick of hot blood spiraling south through his body – his cock making itself known with a throb inside of his too-soft pants. He remembered Ben’s eyes, how they were in the bar, how he’d looked so different then – immediate, menacing. How it had made him suddenly and achingly hard. The difference between that man and the one reclined at his side, enjoying the cool night air, legs kicking indolently over the side of the pontoon, was as stark as if he had slipped on a mask. Or slipped off a mask.

“Why are you here?” Hux asked. It suddenly seemed like an urgent question. He looked over at the pier but the two humanoids had vanished. The lanterns on the beach were just pinpricks of wavering incandescence.

“Maybe I like watching you blush.”

And he did, apparently, because he’d tilted his face toward Hux, a riot of shadows under his tousled hair, and his eyes were open, black as singularity and fixed, like Millicent sizing up a pounce.

“What else do you like about me,” Hux asked, immediately hating that it came out too eager to be a quip. _Damn whiskey._

“Well, that you’re vain, to start with.” Hux made to protest but Ben continued. “I like that you’re uptight. That you’re desperate.”

Hux bristled. “ _You_ followed _me_ here.”

“More than you know. Yes, I—” he frowned, searching for an honest answer maybe. “My mind wasn’t made up - in the bar. But when I touched you, you…unfolded.”

 _Oh_.

In truth, to Hux it had felt less like _unfolding_ or falling apart and more like all the pieces of him – even the discarded, unserviceable parts – coming together. The thought of being so obvious, so knowable sent a shiver through him.  

Ben continued: “You’re afraid of intimacy.” The words felt like something Hux had allowed himself to think once and then vacuumed up and jettisoned – too maudlin, too trite. “You’re afraid that you can’t control the outcome of letting someone else change you – like your hypothetical cataclysm.”

He felt those dark eyes on him – and a truth, pressure like a thumb driving between his eyebrows and at the base of his skull. He swallowed around the coppery taste of his own nerves and eyed the other man’s hands instinctively. They were quiescent, lazy around the flask of _Flameout,_ but Hux had not forgotten the unnerving speed with which he had moved to hold Hux’s face on the end of his fingers.

“Do you want some?” Ben asked, mistaking his curiosity. “It has spice in it. Trace amounts.”

Hux shot him a look he hoped came across disapproving and not totally blitzed. “I hardly think I need to unfold any further. Why are you drinking it?”

Ben made a very young expression, something like _suit yourself_ and took a sip. “It was just something I wanted to try. My father used to drink it from time to time. I always thought it looked…” He smiled to demonstrate – the cavern of his mouth lit up with phosphors.

Hux turned away.

Tension spooled between them, hot and saccharine. He closed his eyes and saw that glowing, sharp-toothed smile.

“And for the record, Hux, you could stand to unfold a lot more,” Ben said. He drained the last of his drink and then wound back and pitched it into the water. It landed with a distant splash. Hux did a quick measure of his drunkenness based on how much time he lost after to the lull of the water against the pylons beneath them.

He thought about what he had set out to accomplish in this place – inspiration - and how awry it had gone - polluted and reshaped by a resurgence of baser needs he’d thought himself separated from, evolved from. He thought about when the other man had pressed a finger under his chin and how it had somehow cast him back down into his body for the first time, potential crashing over him like a wave breaking over a wall.

He thought of the hateful stinging familiar loneliness that had brought him here, away from the light, to the end of a bridge that ended in nowhere.  

“You came here for inspiration,” Ben said - had Hux been speaking aloud? - “Do you think it’s something you can find on your own?”

“Is that why you followed me?” Hux asked. It sounded numbed, barely convincing, like Hux had already swallowed the answer and forgotten the taste. “To inspire me?”

“No." Hux felt his breath soft over the shell of his ear. He’d sat up. "But I want to. And,” he said, quietly amazed. “I think I just want you.”

Hux started at the feel of a hand, gloveless, sliding firm and hot inside his open shirt and roughing a line of electric sensation across his chest.

“Don’t,” Hux gasped, grabbing reflexively over his shirt at the hand cupped under his pectoral, hips jerking forward. Ben’s breath shook hot and wet against his neck.

“Don’t?”

“You don’t need to make it romantic.”

Ben huffed out a laugh. His thumb stroked up over Hux’s nipple, found it with the blunt edge of his nail. Pleasure diffuse and then _sharp_ knifed through his body, a long spark connecting the white-hot point of his nipple to the hard pulse of his prick. Hux shuddered helplessly, hand clamping down like a vise on Ben’s wrist.

“If you want me to fuck you, you’re going to have to ask, Hux.”

Far out over the horizon a streak of purple lightening skittered beneath dark thunderheads; Ben’s eyes sparking black and then violet and then black.

“I don’t know who you are,” Hux said.

_You do._

“Ask me,” he said. Hux’s hearing had narrowed down to the singsong gentle of his voice. He was almost speaking into Hux’s mouth.

“Fuck me,” Hux said instead.

The hand clasping his ribs twitched nervously, and then it was raking a line of fire down his abdomen, pushing through the last two buttons of his shirt and shoving into the front of his leggings. Hux had already been hard on and off for so long it was painful and at the feel of a dry, firm hand rubbing hard and rough over his cock he surged forward, mouth shocked open as Ben stroked a long, mortifying whimper out of him.

Pleasure so abrupt it hurt coiled tight in his gut. It felt like freewheeling in a TIE fighter, like holding on to a live current, his body thrumming, only steady where the other man’s hand was gripping him.

“Ben—” 

He drew back to spit in his palm and Hux whined; furious, disgusted, reeling from need. Then Ben was pulling him off again, in hard, rough strokes that had him sobbing hopelessly into the other man’s shoulder.

“That’s how you need it, huh?”

Hux squirmed, cheeks flaming, hips jerking up into the torturous circle of Ben’s fist. He felt orgasm winding tight, low in his gut, too fast, the muscles of his thighs locking up.

“Tell me you want to come,” Ben said, low and filthy, his thumb rubbing hard into the leaking slit.

Hux tried, a moan trapped thick in his throat. The hand between his legs was slick, relentless, working fast and tight over his cock. His jaw dropped open, eyes pinching shut as he _shook—_

“Order me to fuck you.”

“Stars. _Ren_ ,” he sobbed, hunching around his hand. “ _Please_!” _Make we want it. Let me want it._ His cock pulsed, pleasure flooding, orgasm punching through him, the world whiting out to static.

“Oh, dammit, _Hux—_ ”

Then he was being thrown backward, slammed down on the deck with his legs shoved up over broad shoulders, boots hinged and dangling, and a hot mouth was clamping down over his cock, over the fabric of his leggings, and mouthing him through the last throbs of pleasure as he twitched and trembled.

Hux's heart was rolling around his chest. He drifted between the ragged sounds of his breathing. Up above the sky was an endless sucking black. The first fat drop of rain landed just beneath his eye.

 _Oh no_ , he thought distantly. _I’m letting this happen to me. I_ _’m letting Kylo Ren happen to me._

 

Hux lets out a shaky breath, nostrils flaring against the fetid stink of the alley. His dick is half-hard, skin pricking all over with nerves. He wants those hands on him again, holding him down so that he doesn’t float away.

 _Ren’s_ hands. His mind shudders. _Ren_.

Pieces of the evening – and this morning - are rearranging and coming together backwards and forwards under the auspices of this sudden verisimilitude. The approach at the bar. The stilted, dancing way of speaking – waiting for Hux’s usual stings. The blood lust – rage easily stoked and baited. The probing eyes. The quiet confidence of reflexes honed to a fine edge. 

_The force puns._

Hux has done some truly deplorable things in his life, but all of them pale in comparison to letting Kylo Ren - a man who unironically put “servant of the dark side” as his vocational heading on the ship manifest – jerk him off on a fucking jetty.

Hux lets the wall prop him up as he sags, blinking slowly, his world fuzzing and then stabilizing at the edges.

He is going back to the _Finalizer_ , he decides. First he is going to stamp out any non-regulation footwear Peavey has no-doubt allowed to flourish among his crew, and then he is submitting himself to a vigorous reconditioning so that he can spend the next twenty years fucking a cup and not getting distracted from his work. He will also be submitting a proposal to HR for all outstanding shore leave days accrued by personnel to be converted to extra brisket rations so that he can be assured that all his men are also in the business of cup fucking with him and not have to continue to suppress feelings of inadequacy in the matter.

More urgently, he is going to circulate a fire order among his crew calling for any incoming vessel suspected of transporting Kylo Ren to be atomized on sight.

 _Right_ , he thinks, straightening up, resolve snowballing inside him. He shoves away from the alley wall, feet moving towards the mouth of the alley and the safety of the busy street beyond—

And stops.

Kylo Ren is blocking his way, expression flat.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You did this last time too.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Whoah Kylo, don't _litter!_
> 
> Painfully tender depiction of [Hux rambling his drunk ass off](http://koujaaku.tumblr.com/post/176194304568/imagine-he-shook-his-half-empty-water-drum-for) by koujaaku.


	5. Courtship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux calls Ren's bluff. Ren enjoys it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Please heed the dubious consent tag and take a look at the endnote for a specific trigger warning. 
> 
> Maintaining the push/pull dynamic of the dialogue in this chapter almost destroyed me. And these assholes took too long to undress so I had to push it out another chapter. Hey look, listen kids, don't start writing without a plan.

Hux is not introspective. Case in point, he has managed thus far to completely avoid acknowledging his dearth of sex life by reframing it has an occupational necessity. But if pressed to name the thing that drives him, that galvanizes in him all the qualities that make him so envied and exalted and so loathed among his peers, he would say that that thing, is fear. And nothing gets the synapses of his mind firing quite so fast as a bigger, hungrier predator. 

So when Kylo Ren skids out of his peripheral - blocking Hux’s path of egress out of the alley with his hulking body and impractical hair - Hux swallows hard around a hiccup of unadulterated terror and puts his odds of surviving this encounter through the calculus of logic.

He cannot outrun Kylo Ren. He cannot best him in a fight, even if he were by some feat of misdirection able to get his blade out of his boot. Ren does not appear to have his wretched laser sword on his person but he does have large quick (vulgar) hands and several years of physical training in an unorthodox school of combat that has earned him the dubious title of knight.

Ren can and does read minds. But this construction of his - _Ben_ , he thinks, disgusted - might not. In fact, if this ruse of the common man is the kind of indulgence Hux is beginning to think it is, Ren might be confining himself to his natural abilities as a point of self-determination, which means this: Hux cannot deceive Kylo Ren. 

But maybe he can deceive Ben. 

“—you did this last time too,” Ren finishes saying over the dull clamor of Hux’s thoughts.

“Last time?” Hux asks, aiming for nonplussed. 

The smell of the alley – rain-slick fish guts, piss gone sweet and rancid, something organic liquefying - is thick in the back of his throat; it draws the narrow walls of the alley closer. There are only three more Kylo Ren-sized strides between them.

Ren takes a step forward, sharpening into focus; face blank and calculating, cleaved with light. “On the pier,” he says after a considering beat. “You told me you needed some water, and you left. Carrying a gallon of water.”

“Oh,” Hux says. “Well, I was rather drunk.”

“Not really though.”

Hux flushes crossly. Of course the bastard has no social graces. He is too close already by any metric; backing Hux away from the light and noise of the street where pedestrians are milling about blithely un-assailed. He wonders how long his co-commander was sat in the restaurant ramrodding dumplings down his throat while Hux was compelled to have an existential crisis over a fish head - and tries to keep his face on the less telling end of the neutral-to-homicidal scale.

“Look, Ben—”

“Hux,” Ren says, eyes flat.

“I’m not one to run away from confrontation.”

“You did. Twice.”

“I prefer to face things head on,” he says.

“You shimmied out a window.”

It was a very small window and Hux did indeed shimmy and take a breather and then shimmy again, but as that event represents a very large obstacle to Hux’s preferred self-image he will admit to it only under circumstances of extreme duress.  

“My point is,” he continues. “I’d prefer not to see you, and now that you’ve returned my glove I think it’s best we part ways.”

“I disagree,” Ren says simply, as if this is an acceptable rebuttal. He takes another step closer, shrinking the little remaining distance between them, somehow managing to suck up the last of the light in the alley, like a mean-shouldered eclipse. Hux is shocked to feel the grit of a wall at his back and on the tips of his fingers. He was not aware he was moving backwards.

He considers the man in front of him: the bane of his professional ambitions, unmasked; the disarming face flawed by a constellation of small dark moles like an artist's flourish, brown eyes lambent and watchful, insultingly young. Hux already has a whole bank of taunts about the ridiculous ears and nose, the lopsided chin. But, if he could choose, he would choose not to be so damned attracted to them.

He averts his eyes, ignoring the growing pull of arousal, his pulse speeding in the hollow of his throat, looking down - and is dismayed to discover the boots Ren is wearing are the boots he is always wearing. Hux has become familiar with their exact tread as imprinted on bespoke alusteel fixtures, and on the occasional commissioned officer.

“I have somewhere to be,” he says, weak, even to his own ears.

Ren is merciless, closing the last few inches between them to rest a forearm on the wall beside Hux’s ear with threatening intensity. Something brittle crunches underfoot, and then squelches. “So you keep saying,” he says. “And yet here you are, conveniently cornered." His eyes draw a hot line down Hux’s chest, settling on the front of his pants. "Hard. Again.”

“It’s deficient.”

“It’s for me.”

“ _Ben_ ,” he says, a warning and a plea.

Ren’s mouth twitches, jaw working around a sulk. He takes a revealingly adolescent fortifying breath, exhaling shakily as he reaches down with his free hand to toy with the hem of Hux’s cuff as though the crimson fabric under his gloves has him enthralled. The sleeve twists under Ren’s maladroit fingers, growing tight and then tighter around his wrist like a clumsy suggestion. _That hand has been—_

He yanks his arm away, refusing to be pawed at by a man who uses a rhyming pseudonym.

“Get your hands off me,” he says quietly. The voice he uses is ice, uncompromising, cultivated to suck the oxygen out of a room; honed on sweaty, eager-handed cadets twice his fighting weight and singularly efficient at shutting down opposition from dreadnought captains double his age.

The effect it has on Ren is to make him visibly endeared.

“Fuck,” he breathes onto Hux’s cheek from his scant height advantage, pupils blossoming. His breath is sweet and lightly spiced, like the dark syrup-sauce he’d been eating. “My father warned me about boys like you.”

“I’m not trying to _court_ you, you foul simpleton.”

Ren is (typically) not listening. He grabs up Hux’s hand, gone slack and pliable with nerves and clasps it against his cheek, skin starkly pale and growing flushed under the blood red of the glove. Hux tenses, suddenly gifted with two equally appealing and perturbing options: shove his thumb into Ren’s big stupid eye, or shove his thumb into Ren’s big stupid mouth.

“I want you to,” Ren says bluntly. “I told you, I want you.” His eyes flicker over Hux’s face, searching. Hux realizes he wants credit - a reward for this measure of honesty - like a child licking its lips for the incentive. He reaches out with the hand Hux just shook off, resting his knuckles against Hux’s sternum to feel the traitorous quickening of his breath, smirking, waiting. Hux levels him with an unimpressed glare.

“I don’t give a kriff what you want.”

“Yes,” Ren says, teeth gleaming. “That’s what you said when you kissed me.”

Hux feels his cheeks go hot with blood, adrenalin fizzing at the base of his brain, dispersing through his sympathetic nervous system. A flicker of half-memories: his tongue licking apart plush lips, flesh between his teeth, the breathless pleased timbre of a voice buzzing against his throat: _“I wanted to kiss you first.”_

He crushes the urge to sigh like a starstruck cadet seeing the fruits of a successful orbital bombardment for the first time. “Yes, well,” he says, cocking an eyebrow at Ren’s expectantly parted lips. “Clearly it made more of an impression on you than on me.”

Ren’s eyes darken warningly. If Hux were a console, he’d have already been lightsabered to smithereens. “Maybe I should jog your memory.” 

“Maybe you should jog off,” Hux snaps, darting under his arm and away.

He’d like to say the maneuver is successful because he has had a lifetime of compensating for his light build with speed and agility - but more accurately, Ren probably just allows it; apparently playing his own game of how far he’ll allow Hux to run his leash.

It turns out the leash is very short.

“Are we going to keep doing this, General?”

Hux freezes, his whole body clenching with embarrassment, eyes fixed on the sunlit street ahead; safety inches and lightyears away. It takes a moment, after the first wave of adrenalin diffuses through him, leaving the muscle fibers of his legs twitching with the quashed urge for flight, to find his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can smell the memory on you,” Ren whispers at his back.

Hux spins around on his heel, hissing. “You absolutely _cannot_!”

Ren is grinning, triumphant, suddenly unmistakable as himself just from the quality of malicious glee coming off of him – knowing full well that absurdisms about his flimflam religion are a trap Hux cannot resist. “Alright, I can’t,” he admits. “Like I said, you’re easy to read.”

Hux feels his nose twitch, then his lips, before finally surrendering to a full-fledged sneer. “I’ll have you executed for this.”

Ren is circling him, closing in again, sanguine and terrifying. “On what authority?” 

“My own!” Hux says, retreating backwards. “Read the kriffing charter, you unrepentant stooge.”

“On what grounds then?” Ren asks, leering. “Giving you what you want?”

“You have not one clue what I want,” Hux snarls.

“Oh, I think I do,” Ren says, voice fluctuating high, singsong and resonant. He holds out a hand, beckoning. “Come here.”

Hux is so angry he could spit. He treats his own ego like a darling hand-reared creature: fed and groomed meticulously, tended to with discipline, and taken out on occasion just to pet and admire – just exactly how he would treat Millicent if she would stoop to let him. Kylo Ren’s ego is something closer to a malfunctioning AT-AT that Ren has tethered himself to with a piece of string. 

“You lied to me,” he says, glaring at Ren’s extended hand until it drops.

“I didn’t lie to you. I let you see what you wanted to see.”

“Oh, is that your interpretation of it, _Ben_?”

Ren scowls, fingers twitching at his sides. “Watch your mouth, _Armitage_.”

“Tell me why,” he snarls, meaning all of it. The disguise. The seduction. Following him here to this insipid little planet in order to draw him out of his shell for dissection and eating.

“It was necessary,” Ren says. “My master has foreseen it - the destiny of the Order in the forge of your rebirth.”

“Ren.” Hux takes a shallow breath in through his nostrils. "Your master insisted on investing in a fleet of gas-dirigibles. His interpretation of what is necessary for victory is shaky at best.”

“You underestimate the Resistance’s fear of blimp pageantry," Ren says. "And I didn’t know, at first, that I would be the catalyst. I watched you – waited - for a long time.” His head is dipped, face flushed, waiting again for Hux to feed him some scrap of praise for this admission – _good boy, Kylo! So good at waiting!_

Hux decides to flatten him.

“Are you suggesting,” he says, like a dropper full of poison. “That you adopted a false identity - this bland alter ego, because you convinced yourself, and now _believe,_  that the fate of the Order rests on the laurels of you _getting your dick wet_?”

Ren growls – his usual response to a rational conversation not steering his way. One of his overlarge hands snatches up the front of Hux’s tunic, shoving him bodily against the wall, his leg insinuating itself between Hux’s knees, fingers snarling in the longer hair on top of Hux’s head and wrenching it back, speaking hotly into the stubborn line of his jaw: “Are you going to keep pretending you didn’t know? You sensed it, in the cantina.” 

“I sensed you were a nutcase.”

“No, you sensed the darkness in me. You _responded_ to it.” He breathes out shakily against the corner of Hux’s jaw. “In my wildest fantasies I never—”

“I swear Ren, if you’re about to launch into another one of your ridiculous catechisms, I—”

“You’ll what?” Ren growls, pressing closer. Hux squirms, flinching away from the startling brand of Ren’s hard cock pressed lewdly into his thigh. “Run away again? Go ahead.” He noses forward to breathe into Hux’s ear. “We both know you’ll let me catch you.”

Hux feels the words lance him like a hot needle, a gasp tumbling out of him in steps, excruciatingly loud as he concentrates on not flexing forward, on not rutting up against the promise of Ren’s hot, driving thigh, his thoughts coalescing around the sting of truth. A flood of images: of after – after the act, after Ren had spoiled him, taken him apart with his hands, in the dark, in the rain. Ren’s face awed and covetous, panting, looming over him in the cradle of his thighs, arm straining between them, hand working between his legs. And Hux – he cringes to remember it – had yanked a handful of his beautiful hair, sharply – _“give me all of it – everything”_ – until Ren was moaning, scrambling against him, legs kicking out for purchase as he fucked into his hand, over Hux’s sore dick, and then he’d—

“No,” Hux gasps, recognizing the coaxing brush of Ren’s will in his mind, pulling up the memories with effortless curiosity, like holofilm to be thumbed over. He cringes away from the sudden heavy throb of arousal in his groin, his cock filling out against the fly of his leggings, feet shifting in something slick as he struggles, only succeeding in Ren pressing tighter against him.

“Should I just tell you then?” Ren says, bullying his thighs wider with a rough knee. “How I could barely hold you down. How you turned over and begged for it, like a whore. Like your mother.”

“Don’t,” Hux rasps, cheeks flaming.

“Maybe more like her than you know," Ren breathes, hot in is ear. "Maybe this” – his hand slips down between their bodies to cup Hux, slow and deliberate - “is how you really wanted daddy’s attention.”

Hux hits him, open-handed - sees Ren let it land, face snapped away only slightly by the blow and then back, eyes turning dark and furious. Hux is pinned, paralyzed by that gaze, transfixed by the seam of blood slipping out of the corner of Ren’s mouth; his own fury extinguished like a hot poker plunged into ice water, replaced by the surging tide of desire.

He wets his lips and watches Ren track the movement with vulturine focus, legs parting unconsciously, drawing Ren closer, his shocking red mouth the only thing Hux can see. There are fingers on Ren’s chin – his own, he realizes distantly – smearing through the blood, pressing a thumb into the fat of his bottom lip, tugging it down away from his teeth. Ren is snarling, close enough to bite, close enough that he can taste copper, invasive and ferrous.

“Are you sure you want this to be your first kiss, General?”

“Apparently it’s not," Hux says, almost a whisper in the space between their mouths.  

That earns him a smile, dangerous as a measure of honey. Hux feels again the suggestion of the force, the ghost of a thumb pressed between his brows.

“No,” he says, one hand coming up entreatingly between them, resting over the telltale rabbiting of Ren’s heart. The pressure recedes, Ren pulling back  “Show” - (he shouldn’t say it) - “Show me. How I did it.”

He has the satisfaction of seeing actual shock break over the man’s features; eyes widening, almost innocent, his mouth twitching at the corners – the nascent stages of a smile, banked and bated. “How you surprise me."

Hux closes his eyes. He can’t look. He doesn’t want to see the mouth (that _mouth_ ), closing in with predatory determination.

There is a hot puff of air over his chin.

“I didn’t close my eyes,” Ren says.

Hux starts, eyes opening at the sound of him so close.

Their lips touch, feather soft – a sensation like touching a positive charge – the magnetic tang of blood - and then Ren’s mouth is coaxing Hux’s roughly open, tongue shoving into the back of his mouth artlessly, drawing back to suck a line of feral, wet kisses over his chin and then darting back just as quick to draw Hux’s top lip into his mouth.

Hux, disoriented and offended, attempts to get his jaw under control enough to dictate the pace, but that just earns him a moan, obscenely loud, and then Ren is diving in to seize his bottom lip between his teeth, tugging sharply with a _snap_. Hux yelps in surprise and jerks his head back against the wall and Ren, ruthless, pursues, crowding against him even further, slapping Hux’s hands out from between them as he bites sloppily over the hinge of his jaw before retreating with a contented noise. 

He draws Hux’s jaw up in his cupped hands, dark eyes blown and searching. “And then I said...”

“I wanted to kiss you first,” Hux says on a sigh, eyes falling shut, tongue darting out to taste the leather tip of Ren’s thumb in the corner of his mouth.

Ren breathes out, shakily. “I don’t give a kriff what you want.”

For a handful of moments they do nothing but stand, their chests knocking together on ragged inhales. Hux swallows around a hundred foolish things he wants to say, his pulse thudding urgently in his groin, hands trembling with want. Ren has no such compunction. 

“Let me take you somewhere I can undress you,” he says.

In an act of egregious self-sabotage, Hux says ok.

 

Hux could never recount how he gets from the alley behind _Hook'em Catch’em_ to Ren’s hotel room. He only remembers the awkward pace they set, two military men falling into stride as if they had a purpose and destination other than sucking each other’s dicks.

The room is as sterile and unremarkable as Hux’s own; level with a grubby looking building advertising a number of vices with faltering neon signs. The bed is unmade, the mess Ren has made of the top sheet bordering on artistic. The table under the window is strewn with the detritus of a disorganized mind – Ren’s barbaric helmet, his lightsaber hilt, a hotel flimsipad with an overtly-phallic sketch of a speeder in one corner, a scattering of gray plastifoam packages with their foil covers peeled back.

Hux’s eyes land on the logo.

“Are those our MREs?” he asks before he can stop himself, bristling. “That’s First Order property!”

“Hux, I don’t want to talk about rations,” Ren says, manhandling him backwards towards the bed and somehow managing to snatch a glove off one of Hux’s flailing hands with his teeth, spitting it out. “I want to talk ab—”

“Don't—”

“—out getting my cock inside you.”

Ren’s grin is somehow both beatific and savage as he shoves Hux down onto the bed, clambering on top of him as Hux attempts to shuffle back on his elbows, their boots squeaking together. Hux becomes suddenly and intimately aware of what he must smell like.

“I’m – I’ve been wearing the same clothes for a cycle.”

“Hux,” Ren supplies unhelpfully, running his hands up Hux’s arms and pressing them into the mattress above his head. Before Hux can stop him he is shoving his face into the fabric at his armpit, drawing in a deep shuddering breath and then practically growling with pleasure. The sound has arousal shooting shameful and liquid up Hux’s spine, bowing his back.

Hux recognizes that he is in some sort of fugue state, wherein he is going to let Kylo Ren – a man who once threw a tantrum so obscene he felt compelled to lock himself inside a TIE fighter in full view of a platoon of stormtroopers - to put his ankles over his head, but he’s certainly not going to allow him to do it before Hux has washed.

“I need a shower!” he snaps, panicking.

After a measured beat, Ren sits back up, falling off him and onto his side, waving an imperious hand at the ensuite.

Hux hits the lock the moment the door seals shut. He knocks the tap sensor with the back of his hand before working the neck of his shirt loose, letting the hiss of water drown out the rush of breath that has been trapped under his ribs since Ren skated into his day. His reflection in the mirror is a mess of orange hair and pink cheeks and lips bitten near to bleeding. There is no shower setting in the vast reaches of the known galaxy that can make him look less like a harlot.

“Open the door, Hux.”

Through the fogged partition he can see Ren’s impatient silhouette, his arms braced on the frame.

“Give me a minute.”

“I don’t want to. You’re overthinking in there. And I’ve had an idea. We can undress each other. That way we’re even.”

“That’s very mature of you, Ky-Lo,” he says affably. “If you come through that door uninvited I am going to unmake you.”

“Promises, promises,” Ren says as the door shrieks open in its tracks. He reaches over and waves the tap off. He’s depantsed himself, which is as insulting as it is bewildering, and his legs are startlingly white.

He bulls his way between Hux and the vanity top, guiding Hux in with a gentle grip on his elbows, waiting until he has Hux’s attention - Hux having fallen into something of a trance after seeing the enticing line of Ren’s cock in his thin shorts - before speaking: “You can undress me first, if you want. How you want.” He places Hux’s hand over the high collar of his jacket.

Hux swallows, hoping despite himself that Ren will politely ignore the trembling of his fingers as he tugs at the narrow placket, cinching it tighter and then back, revealing a palm’s length of small hooks come free, repeating the process all the way down until he can push the structured garment up over Ren’s shoulders. He folds it with practiced rhythm, an attempt to settle his nerves. Underneath is a soft cotton tank, damp with sweat – Hux’s nostrils flare – which he peels up over Ren’s head and arms, upsetting his hair, and Ren, strangely docile, lets him. His eyes skitter over the taut curve of his chest, the appealing smatter of hair between his pectorals, skin nacrous and pale as candle wax. Ren breathes carefully, stomach tensing under his gaze. Hux swallows again, eyeing the grey briefs and the suspect wet patch at their front.

Ren blows an errant curl out of his face. “Take them off,” he says. He returns Hux’s glare. “Take them off or it’s my turn.” 

“You child,” Hux mutters, pulling the elastic hard and ducking down to roll the shorts off him, folding them on top of the rest of the clothing to avoid looking at his obnoxiously hard prick. When his hands have nothing left to do Ren takes them, guiding them slowly over the coarse hair of his thighs and setting them in the arrow of his hips, shifting almost nervously against the vanity.

Ren like this, pliant and dismantled, is all possibility. Among the man’s many inborn talents – including the ability to intuit which bespoke fixtures aboard the _Finalizer_ are non-flame retardant - he also possesses the knack for making his quarry forget (and remember, as it suits him) the raw strength of his hands, the dark luster of his starving eyes. But Hux knows: under his hand, breathing and waiting, is a weapon.

Ren smiles; a baleful reflection. At Hux’s scowl of disapproval he rolls his eyes. “I told you,” he says. “You’re an open book.”

“Yes, well,” Hux sniffs. “I don’t have an apparatus to hide behind.”

“Just one tool of many. I have mine as you have yours.”

“And you’re willing?” Hux says, fingers tightening, sucking in a sharp breath, “to be one of mine?”

_A tool?_

_A weapon._

Ren sighs. “You would see it that way. No. I’m saying we can be partners. And” - he pries at the collar of Hux’s jacket, his eyes flicking up to lock on Hux’s – “This can just be what it is too.”

Before Hux can decipher that, Ren is moving, yanking the leather jacket down his arms in two sharp movements that have him stumbling between the cage of Ren’s legs, elbows bound at his sides for a harrowing moment before Ren is ripping it off him, dumping it on the floor and pulling his tunic top off in a flurry that has Hux dazed, half-naked. Ren pulls him closer with a grip on his fly – jerking it open with a series of lazy, flourished tugs and sitting back to admire his work.

Hux closes his eyes. If he can’t see the clothes strewn at his feet, he doesn’t need to hang them up. He can still faintly smell the cloying rot of the alley. 

“Ask me,” Ren says, almost musical.

“Get karked,” Hux says.

Ren pulls at him. With the force. Not the full, humiliating drag which the knight seems to employ as the fastest means of getting his hand wrapped around some poor creature’s throat, and not the combative thrust which typically results in an invoice for plastisteel repair - just two hands at his waist, almost chivalrous and one-hundred percent terrifying, prompting him to rock up onto his toes like an aborted assist.

The effect on his nervous system is like detonating a charge.

“Lights zero percent,” he gasps.

It’s actually worse, in the darkness. Ren’s aroused breathing echoes in the tiled space. His hands could be anywhere.

“Do you think I can’t see you?” 

“I’m not a coward!”

A pause. “I didn’t say that you were.”

Hux doesn’t answer, holding his breath and stripping out of his leggings and underwear, stumbling out of his boots. If Ren actually can see in the dark, like some sort of perverted sith nightmare, then what he sees is this: Hux, shucked: worm-pale and narrow-bodied, hair irreversibly fluffed, cock throbbing angrily between his legs, arms held tense at his sides, poised to cover.

He starts at the feeling of Ren’s hands trailing reverently over the jut of his hips, one thumb sneaking out to stroke possessively through the line of hair under his navel. 

 _I’m not a coward_ , he thinks again. A mantra against the dark, against old stings and older voices.

Ren’s voice in his brain is a struck match:

_Prove it._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Trigger Warning: Ren ignores what Hux is saying and uses the Force to push his agenda (and the agenda is getting Hux's pants offs) and there is also a completely off base insinuation from Ren that Hux wants sexual attention from his father. 
> 
> My apologies to Will Graham for all the fish/lure analogies that went down in this.
> 
> Comments are my master and my sustenance. Drop me a line.


	6. Lovekiller Starmaker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hux wants one thing. He gets two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Full disclosure I was thirsting over pics of Supreme Beefcake while I wrote this and

Ren’s body is larger, closer in the dark, but safer to touch. He is infuriatingly patient as Hux explores him with his hands.

Which is not to say that Ren is a passive participant in his getting felt up. He moves now and then, arching under Hux’s palms to present the parts of him of which he is most proud - the defined cut of his hips, his enviably solid chest – and drawing Hux’s fingers where he thinks he deserves more of his admiration - his abs (tensed), a small knot of scar tissue he probably expects Hux to ask about.

Hux can appreciate vanity. He likes nothing about the _Finalizer_ half so much as he likes his own reflection caught in her dark transparisteel, the glossy snap of his jackboots across her command deck. In his more insomniac moments, or after a particularly invigorating floss, he can be soothed with the ritual of sheathing himself in his uniform; whole when he is sharp-shouldered and sleek, his copper-blond hair immaculate under his cap.

Sometimes, Hux imagines Ren as his doppelganger, in front of his own mirror as Hux is in front of his; twins separated by the thin wall of the fresher: Ren, lionhearted and radiant, hands braced over the sink as he leans close to admire the results of a day spent battering practice dummies into fragments, satisfied; Hux bowed forward, leached and hollow-eyed, searching, desperate for the same.

But naked, Hux is always Brendol’s son; thin, insubstantial - _"half-grown, half-useful, half a man"_ \- his pinprick eyes having never lost their hungry gleam, marking him as a creature of avarice. And now he is only half-brave, his hands trailing everywhere but where he wants them to go, unable to admit to himself that he is adrift, waiting for the moment of stillness to be over, for Ren to open his ludicrous mouth and pull him back into orbit.

“Hux, hurry up and touch my dick.”

Hux grimaces, pressing his forehead into the warm slope of Ren’s shoulder. His skin radiates heat - unsurprising given that he is always in a state of gestating the next idiot thing to come out of his mouth.

“You’ll like it,” Ren says on queue in his usual tenor half-whisper. “I can sense it.”

Hux exhales, debating the merit of engaging in yet another argument over force semantics with the other man. The last time they’d gotten into it had culminated in Ren punting a flight helmet through the _Finalizer’s_ magcon field.

The thing is, Ren doesn’t need to read his thoughts to glean that Hux is eager, that he is fearfully desperate to touch his cock. He might always have been - from the moment Ren brushed past him on the _Finalizer_ \- waiting to have Ren vulnerable and contained in his hand. Control is his preferred diet after all, and every tiny jump of Ren’s flesh under his fingertips, each shiver of breath, has him swelling, cored out with desire, appetite whetted.

It was his father, of course, who taught him to crave the taste of it; back in his early days at the Academy when he had convinced himself of one simple, vital lie: _I will prove myself, and he will acknowledge me._

The chance to prove himself came when Brendol conducted a routine visit to the shooting range where the cadets were hunkered down in muddy sniper beds, suited up against the driving rain. Brendol picked his way through the tableau of motionless pairs, observing with dispassion as each marksman took the shot, the Staff Sergeant trailing nervously behind him.

Hux collected his nerves, cheek pressed to the stock of his rifle as he felt his spotter’s hand tighten with anticipation in the small of his back. The static target - a chewed-up old imperial droid -was already lined up at the 800-meter mark, an easy enough distance given the TL-29’s capabilities, but difficult to accurately sight in the pounding rain. All that was left to do was exhale, and shoot.

Finally, the commander approached him. Hux felt his gaze like a weight across his shoulders, hatred calcifying in him until he felt steady enough to pull the trigger. The droid’s head came off. A showy shot, and not what his spotter had calculated for.

“Cadet,” his father barked. Never Cadet Hux. 

“Yes sir!” Hux said, accent scrubbed clean. He rose to salute with pristine good form. Brendol’s face was unreadable under the brown hood of his rainsuit. The blaster fire had subsided, the other cadets watching the exchange with sadistic anticipation.

“Who is in control here?”

“I am, sir,” Hux said without hesitation.

“Very good.”

Hux trembled with pride. Warn rain blew down the collar of his camo-canvas. He couldn’t quite suppress the smug pull of his mouth.

“You will retrieve the droid’s head,” Brendol said. Hux felt the almost-smile drop off his face, dread blooming hot and queasy in his stomach. “Staff Sergeant, give the order to resume fire after five minutes.” The ground shifted under his feet, legs turning to jelly. He could run 800 meters in maybe three minutes - but he would still need to make it back. His father turned back to him. “Understood, cadet?”

Hux’s voice was shrill, overloud. “Yes sir!”

“Good. Now, I ask you again.” He leaned slightly closer. “Who is in control here?”

This time Hux gave him the right answer.

And all the way to the 800-meter mark, lungs burning, mud slipping under his ungainly boots, he felt the promise of his peers’ jealousy and contempt, and his father’s cool indifference - imagined their blaster sights lined up in the center of his back, a murky insignificant figure almost disappeared in the thick rain, and the words looping over and over:

 _Who is in control here?_ _Who is in control here?_ _Who—_

“Hux. Stop thinking about your father,” Ren says. In the dark, his deceptively soft voice almost sounds like it does when he is interrogating a prisoner, and the reactive pulse of fear draws Hux back into the present, to where his palms are clasped over Ren’s ribs. “It’s killing my hard on.”

 _Liar_ , Hux thinks, and rocks forward to slide their bodies together, finally, warm skin against warm skin, a gasp ricocheting between them as Hux’s hips roll reflexively and Ren reacts, surging up to meet him, his cock smearing wet and startlingly hot over the crease of Hux’s thigh. It’s too much – Ren’s stomach quaking against him - it’s – he does it again, giving in to the animal urge to roll his hips, languorous and slutty against Ren’s hard flesh, burying his face in Ren’s neck to let go of a moan as his leg hitches up and – there - pleasure blooms hot at the base of his spine. Ren’s hands clamp down over his hips crushingly hard and the ensuite walls creak around them, the mirror vibrating worryingly in its fittings.

“Control yourself!” Hux hisses.

Ren moans. “Do it for me.”

Hux bites him – _spoiled boy_ \- right in the meat of his shoulder, jerking forward against Ren’s restraining grip (or urged on by it, he’s not sure of semantics at this point) and rutting shamelessly against him, cockhead grazing over the coarse hair of his groin. Ren makes a guttural noise, grip changing, fingers clawing his ass cheeks apart so that Hux jolts at the feeling of cool air on his hole. The sudden reality of what he’s about to let Ren do to him there – the violation – has him keening with loathsome arousal, thigh hitching higher so that his dick rubs with disastrous precision against Ren’s.

“Lights,” Ren gasps.

Hux recoils from the sudden flood of fluorescence. “Lights twenty percent!”

“Lights sixty.”

“Lights—”

“Hux!” Ren growls, wrenching him around and cramming him against the vanity with his body. “Let me see you.”

Hux glares at the countertop. He has been seen naked before of course. Since gaining his commission he has had a private fresher, but before that he used the gang showers, and before that he attended the Academy, where nudity was practically institutionalized, and where – like everybody else - he was subject to hazing. But always during that time he wore the impermeable armor of disinterest. He never had to bear scrutiny while his dick was rock hard and pointing at what it wanted in the mirror like: _There! That man there! The degenerate with the wonky chin._

“Fuck,” Ren says, as articulate as ever. “Fuck. Look at you. Red all over, like your little ginger cat.” He hears the memory of Ren’s voice again, through the richer fuzz of the vocoder: _Here kitty kitty._

He lifts his gaze to scowl at the other man, trying not to see what they look like together. He wonders if Ren knows - that this how they always tried it with him, the long string of boys and men incited by his haughty mien, sniffing out a challenge. Going by the nasty smile he is half-assedly trying to smother in the crook of Hux’s shoulder – yes, he does.

“Ren, if you have designs on fucking me, I strongly advise you not to talk about my cat.”

“Your _stolen_ cat,” Ren says defiantly, already distracted by the reflection of his own hand smoothing down Hux’s stomach, destined for his cock.

“She was abandoned,” he protests, shivering. “Alone. I found her.”

“She had a collar.”

“A _cheap_ one. She likes me better. She—”

But whatever he was going to say is lost as Ren gets a hand around him, stroking lightly, one arm circling to brace over his chest as Hux sags forward against the counter, wholly focused on not embarrassing himself. “I could take it away from you,” Ren says, breath teasing over the shell of his ear. “This conflict. Your hesitancy. I could make you _easy_ for it. You’d take anyone then. Me, your fawning lieutenant, droids... _traitors_.”

Hux shudders, rutting helplessly into his evil, clever hand. “Stop.”

“And then what?” Ren says, nosing at his hair. “Leave you like this?” He strokes, slow and filthy. “When you’re so close - to having me just where you want me.” He grinds his prick against him.

Hux grabs his wrist, urging him to move, eyes slamming shut so that he doesn’t have to see Ren’s awful smirk, or his own stricken features. As punishment Ren gives him only the circle of his fingers at the head of his cock to fuck into; perfect, slick with precome, and drawing away again and again when Hux tries to push for more so that he is forced to fuck obediently, in increasingly shallow thrusts, his balls tightening.

“Yes,” Hux gasps, pleasure spreading white-hot, so hot it feels wet, over his cock and groin until he is numb and aching with it. Ren gives him the sudden full stroke of his hand and Hux surges forward, on the precipice – and finds the frustrating ring of fingers waiting, thwarting him. His eyes snap open to find Ren staring at him in the mirror, pupils huge. He licks his lips and Hux jerks at the feeling of a knuckle stroked rudely between his cheeks and against his entrance, smearing him open. Hux swallows, pulse ratcheting, cock twitching hard. 

“I can be gentle, if you want,” Ren says after a beat, voice lilting. “I can be gentle. With you.”

It’s a lie. It’s several lies. Ren is a monster born and built. If he once knew the language of tenderness, of his mother’s doting affection or his father’s boundless generous heart, those words are just echoes now; light from a star a thousand years dead.

And pain has never been a cost Hux is unwilling to pay anyway.

“Do it,” he says. “Make it hurt or I’ll slit your throat.” He doesn’t add that he will likely attempt to slit his throat at some point in the near future regardless.

Ren’s smile is just about the worst thing he’s ever seen. He only has a microsecond to appreciate the finesse with which he has been goaded into giving Ren carte blanche to do whatever-the-bloody-fuck he wants, before Ren is uncurling his thumb into him – shocking, sharp pressure – and then drawing back only to shove two massive fingers inside him.

Hux yelps, one hand shooting out against the mirror as he scrambles forward and away, Ren pressing up against his back, relentless, trying to work his dry fingers further in – a child who always got a new toy when he broke the old one.

“Slick,” Hux wheezes. “Slick!”

“Beg me,” Ren croons, doing something with his fingers that has Hux squirming, spitting curses at him.

“ _Please_! Please— Please—” he hiccups, not sure where he’s going with it, focused on evading Ren’s prying, scraping fingers and getting his cock back into that perfect slippery circle.

Ren stiffens up against him, muttering wetly into the back of his neck – something about taking the edge off - his questing fingers stretching apart and hooking down, tugging at Hux’s rim and sending a twinge of pain up his spine. Hux makes a shameful noise when Ren lets go of his cock to draw a hand up the back of his thigh, palming his cheek roughly and prying him open, fingers spearing deeper.

It stings. _Kriff_ it stings. His hips rabbit up, jarring against the vanity, trying to escape the dry burn of pressure, but Ren at his back is as solid and immovable as a bulkhead. He grips him again, the barest consolation of his circled fingers to fuck into in short frustrated jabs, arousal winding tight in his groin. Ren rubs his fingers firm and nasty under the head of his cock, and Hux _sobs_ , head dropping between his shoulders, going boneless.

“I can take the edge off,” Ren says, clearer this time, hips grinding a slow circle against Hux’s backside. “It will be ok.”

 _What?_ Hux looks up, mouth open. It takes a moment for him to recognize the determined look in Ren’s eyes. Ren is looking down at him, at his knuckles pressing slowly into the tight clutch of Hux’s hole. In addition to the sudden and terrifying knowledge that if Ren spits on him there he is probably going to come, Hux realizes that Ren is considering using the force on him.

“ _Don’t_ ,” he says, voice gone high and shaky. _Don’t you dare!_

Ren shushes him, fingers withdrawing, stilling dangerously. Hux meets his stare in the mirror - recognizes it for the mistake it is in the same moment as he is walloped with strange euphoria, body turning slack and weightless, two thumbs of pressure digging into the tender points either side of his jaw. His vision doubles and resolves, pleasant fuzziness diffusing at the base of his brain.

 _Ren_ , he tries to say, but all that comes out of his mouth is an odd stuttering noise, like laughter with no voice behind it - and then something huge and blunt up is sliding up inside him, frictionless, expanding, turning him liquid. It’s too big, too deep; Hux throbbing around it, shuddering uselessly. He bears down around nothing, rim twitching, stretched too tight to contract and finally just gives in and moans openly, riding the sensation of it pushing inexorably deeper, on and on and on and on. Ren circles an experimental finger around his hole but Hux can’t feel it, everything from the waist down gone numb and tight, cock drooling endlessly onto the countertop as if he is already coming. 

“Is it good?” Ren asks, shaking against him. “Is it enough?” He is the boy again, Hux realizes - wanting approval, for Hux to say: _Oh yes Kylo, of all the many force cocks I’ve been fucked on yours if my favorite._

He screws his eyes shut and nods, and Ren sighs happily against his neck and reaches down to touch him – just the pads of his fingers rubbing determinedly at the too-sensitive skin between the head and shaft and—

It is enough. He is coming, clamping down around the invisible pressure. Ren is saying something low and filthy in his ear – ugly poetry – but it is lost to the thin high hum of static as he seizes, shooting hard and sharp over the sink, the countertop, the mirror—

And then somehow he is stumbling as Ren drags him out of the bathroom with a rough hand around his bicep, shoving him towards the bed. Hux flops like a landed fish on the strewn sheets, winded, stomach muscles still jumping with aftershocks. Ren’s smell is intense on the dirty bedding, still warm from the setting Sal Pathita sun – the perfume of his hair, the musky smell of spunk.

“I jerk off a lot,” Ren says by way of explanation, as if Hux doesn’t already know that from the reports of his traumatized laundry droids. His ass jiggles as he roots around the console table, and Hux is disgustingly entranced by it. When he turns around Hux finally allows himself to look at his dick. _Kriffing dammit_ , he thinks. Kylo Ren’s dick is just exactly what he’d expected: thick and straight, luxuriously uncut. He could pick Kylo Ren’s dick out of a line up of dicks based purely on how annoying he finds it.

“You were right,” Ren says, approaching to kneel on the end of the bed with his usual feline grace and yanking Hux’s legs apart at the knee. “I don’t know how not to hurt you.” He tugs Hux up into his lap, uncapping the slick. “But I think you’re going to like it. I think—” He pauses, chewing over whatever ridiculous holoporn line that he’s about to test out on Hux. “I think you’re going to squeal like a New Republic whore.”

Hux cuffs him right in the mouth.

“Frisky,” he says, unforgivably, and curls two slick fingers into him. It feels—

Hux throws his arms over his face, cock filling out, arousal spiraling down to meet Ren’s fingers working in and out of him with crude efficiency. Ren doesn’t stop until he is writhing, mortifyingly hard again, and then without warning Ren is shouldering Hux’s thighs open, lining up and thrusting home so hard it knocks the breath out of both of them.

 _Yes_ , Ren breathes into his mind, ecstatic as Hux spasms around him, gasping for air, for any sensation that isn't Ren's enormous prick scraping up inside him. Ren hovers over him for a beat of rare patience, eyes wide, breathing hard, his hair a corona of trembling curls. Hux could almost feel affection for him in that moment, were it not for the appalling noise he makes when he pulls out partway, tip poised at his smarting rim, and then fucks back in, stuffing his full length rudely into Hux’s slicked hole. Then Ren is moving, an undeniable force, the whole bed shifting with the violent snap of his hips, and Hux is forced to grab onto his shoulders – then his hair – scrambling for purchase as Ren pounds into him, push-pulling him over the sheets, whining his pleasure out against Hux’s cheek.

Time slips sideways for a short while. He tries to turn over at one point, to hide his face in the mattress, but Ren twists him back over, breathlessly pleased, hitching his thighs higher on his shoulders and crushing Hux down into the mattress, his cock glancing over a spot inside him that has him gasping, shaking uncontrollably. He squirms, trying to get out from under Ren’s too-big-too-hot body but then Ren is fisting his cock, pressing it against his stomach and rubbing over it with the flat of his hand, wet with slick. He can’t come again so soon, and yet it feels like he is, hips humping up against Ren, spine trembling. 

“Yeah, fuck yes—” Ren says, like an idiot, jerking Hux’s cock perfectly as Hux starts to spill again, pulling his cock out so he can fuck back in brutally hard, right in and up—

His second orgasm knifes down his spine as he clamps down on Ren’s dick, jaw locking up around a scream, jerking his head away from Ren’s hot breath.

“Hux! Hux, _oh!_ Hux—” Ren almost folds him in two as he starts to come, frantically grabbing up the sheets under Hux's shoulder to muffle the horrible, high-pitched noise he makes as he jerks, hips driving hard, too hard; so deep inside him that it  _aches_ as Ren shudders and spills, his hands running mindless and butterfly-soft, trembling over Hux’s arms, touching at his hair almost reverently before bracing against the pillow. His face, disarmed and slack with pleasure, twitches, coming down, arms shaking where he is trying to hold himself up, and Hux strokes some of his hair out of his face – a gesture too soft for either of them to stand for longer than a heartbeat.

“Hux,” Ren sighs, rolling off him, thumbs coming up to press at the corners of Hux’s lips. “Hux,” he breathes again and kisses him, wet and lazy.

Unlike their first (and second) kiss, it is good.

After a while, Ren can’t help himself and presses mean fingers into the bruise on his jaw and Hux snarls, biting at the half-healed cut on Ren’s lip in warning and they both draw away, Ren pulling a sheet up over them. Hux suspects that pillow talk is not going to be his purview, and apparently it’s not Ren’s either, because after an uncomfortable amount of time spent staring at each other and cataloging each others’ vulnerabilities, Ren says, in his half-whispered staccato:

“I’ve never felt so close to the dark side. You were…transcendent. When I made love to you.”

Hux makes a crushed sound. Ren’s eyes track over his face expectantly, but he is otherwise completely unapologetic about the indefensible garbage that just rolled out of his mouth. Hux seethes, but mostly at himself: for having forgotten that Ren is an ill-socialized gargoyle of a man with no manners and no grasp on reality; and for not having predicted this new attempt to unsettle him; but mostly for wanting him regardless.

 _Inspiration_ , he thinks contemptuously.

“Yes,” Ren says out loud, bringing one of Hux’s hands up to his lips, pressing a dry kiss to his knuckles. “I feel it too.” A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “And I’ve wanted you - so bad,” he husks.

“Badly,” Hux corrects.

“Yes,” Ren says, snugging a thigh between his legs and pulling the sheet up over their heads.

“I can’t trust you,” Hux says, quieter in the close space. It sounds like a question.

“Is that what you need from me? Trust?”

“I need power,” Hux says. “And control. I need my—” Legacy sounds like too large a word to say to someone he is ostensibly sharing a sheet fort with. “I don’t want to be distracted.”

Ren snorts. “Hux. I am going to make you stronger.”

“You—” He stops; breathes through his nose. “You have no control.”

Ren nods as if Hux has given him a compliment, ignoring the arch tone. He trails his fingers down the vulnerable line of Hux’s sternum and splays his hand over Hux’s hip; thumb stroking back and forth through the line of his sticky pubic hair.

“You need an outlet too,” he says, eyes drifting shut. “Release. You’re a physicist, you should know - all that energy has to go somewhere,” he says, hand trailing up over Hux’s chest and throat possessively until his breathing turns even and restful.

Hux lies there for a long time, trying to puzzle out whether he is offended. He is not a physicist. He _directs_ physicists. But Ren’s complete misunderstanding of the work Hux does for the Order is nothing new. Ren has, after all, misinterpreted his own duties as one: run my idiot mouth, and; two: antagonize my co-commander by chopping up the things he likes, neither of which is a quantifiable Key Performance Indicator.

After a while he thinks he must have been asleep, and now might be awake - except for Ren’s fingertips stroking carefully over the tips of his eyelashes, the edge of his brow. His large hand moving to push his hair back and forth a few times, maybe testing how it looks, tweaking it this way and that over his forehead and around his ears - and Hux falls away...

And wakes into his favorite dream.

He is on the _Finalizer_ , before the viewport. He doesn’t need to turn around to know his crew is there behind him, competent, working. Before his eyes a planet is dying so that a star can live. The planet is Arkanis, even though he has never seen Arkanis from orbit; but it is Arkanis, with a wetside and a sunnyside, and a manor house always being built and a house full of rain. And in the dream he can hear the screaming as the planet breaks apart and is reformed. And he can feel a hand on his shoulder, and a voice – “ _is it enough_ ” – and when he looks down the floor drops away to snow and fire and deafening applause.

Hux wakes at exactly 0300 hours. He slips out of bed and goes to the pad of flimsi on the table. Under the weak light from the street he sketches out a small, inelegant design on the same page as Ren’s speeder cartoon - an additional component to his model.

Quieted, he heads back to bed and and watches the crawl of neon pink rainwater reflected on Kylo Ren’s wan features while he sleeps - one arm slung across his stomach and the other hooked over his head and around his pillow, the kind of unselfconscious posture Hux would expect of a boy half his age - and thinks of distant stars and vulnerable suns.

Tomorrow he will return to the _Finalizer_ , attempt to hold his cat, find the right words to say to Peavey to imply he did a piss-poor job of playing at general.

Later there will be a time to weigh the value of this thing between them, test it for weaknesses like testing a particle shield for a point of entry. And one day, a betrayal. Or love, if necessary.

But first, the death of a star.

And then, after: order.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: And there it is! My first fic - born out of wanting to know why Hux might be a virgin and how it could be wrapped up in a bunch of wanky metaphors about the genesis of Starkiller. Thanks for all your lovely comments and kudos. This fic is really just my super gross love letter to you all. 
> 
> Let me know what you think!
> 
> EDIT: Now with the most amazing art of [Hux and Kylo as doppelgangers](http://koujaaku.tumblr.com/post/175140926781/sometimes-hux-imagines-ren-as-his-doppelganger) of each other and of [Hux "rescuing" Millicent](http://koujaaku.tumblr.com/post/174431928670/she-was-abandoned-hux-protests-shivering) by the ridiculously talented koujaaku.


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